Ted Nelson - GoKawiil

Gwern revisits Project Xanadu's collapse at a 50th-anniversary gathering for Ted Nelson's manifesto

At a San Francisco party marking 50 years since Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, attendees examined memorabilia and vintage machines running old Xanadu hypertext software, with a former Autodesk-era Xanadu programmer sharing firsthand stories. The event became an occasion for reflecting on why Xanadu, despite its influential vision of hypermedia, never became a practical, widely used system.

gwern.net · 2026-09-04

Ted Nelson's decades-old Xanadu hypertext vision resurfaces amid rise of AI agents

A new essay revisits Ted Nelson's 1960s Project Xanadu, which proposed a 'docuverse' where documents kept every version and quotations linked back to their original source rather than being copied. That system never took off because the web instead adopted simple, breakable links that pushed maintenance onto users rather than the system itself. The piece argues that the rise of AI agents is now reviving interest in Nelson's original approach to tracking provenance and versioning.

zed.dev · 2026-09-01