It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.
Project Xanadu
Wired magazine published an article entitled "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".[3] The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released. A version described as "a working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014.
The lessons of Xanadu
“The longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry”
Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
Xanadu Was Waiting for Agents
From the Zed Blog: Ted Nelson specified the docuverse sixty years ago. The technology finally arrived, and so did its native users.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
A mere fifteen years ago, computer nerds were seen as m…
A quote from Andrew Quinn
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the …
“Computers enable fantasies” – On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings
“The computer has long been a solution looking for problems—the ultimate technological fix which insulates us from having to look at problems.” – Joseph Weizenbaum (1983) Trying to kee…
Humanities in the Machine - Blain Smith
There is something quietly remarkable about the people who built the foundations of modern computing. Not their technical achievements, though those are extraordinary. What is remarkable is where they came from before they ever touched a machine.
HyperCard Changed Everything
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
Early Tools for Thought, Mark Bernstein @ Tools For Thought Rocks
This machine kills secrets: how WikiLeakers, cypherpunks and hacktivists aim to free the world's information
The barbarians aren't at the gates. They're inside. Thi…
Liberatory Computing
A community seeking to catalyze discontent with the state of computing by understanding the roles of production, labor, and power in shaping the foundations of digital systems. libcomp.org
Phil Agre's Home Page
It was a huge honor to present the opening keynote address at #SIGIR2026 and to talk about the need for IR to resist uncritical adoption of…
We Refuse, We Want, We Commit: Volume 1
Informatics of the Oppressed
On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse
tante (@tante.cc)
