We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
What I thought would be called Xanadu is called the World Wide Web and works differently, but has the same penetration.
—Ted Nelson, 1999It was a vision in a dream. A computer filing system that would store and deliver the great body of human literature, in all its historical versions and with all its messy interconnections, acknowledging authorship, ownership, quotation and linkage. Like the Web, but much better: no links would ever be broken, no documents would ever be lost, and copyright and ownership would be scrupulously preserved. The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu. In this place, users would be able to mark and annotate any document, see and intercompare versions of documents side by side, follow visible hyperlinks from both ends (‘two-way links’) and reuse content pieces that stay connected to their original source document. There would be multiple ways to view all this on a computer screen, but the canonical view would be side-by-side parallel strips with visible connections (‘visible beams’). Just imagine. This vision – which is actually older than the Web, and aspects of it are older than personal computing – belongs to hypertext pioneer Theodor Holm Nelson, who dubbed the project Xanadu in October 1966.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
