The Jackal's Curse: A Feature-Length Reply to "The Curse of Xanadu"
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Transcript
Hi, I'm Ted Nelson.
In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died — Edgar Allan Poe, the great poet, the great short story writer, the great cryptographer — whereupon a man named Rufus Griswold published an obituary saying that Poe had been a drunkard, a narcotics addict, and a street stumblebum. This became the world's picture of Edgar Allan Poe. It was a pack of lies.
Well, in 1995, Wired magazine did a Griswold job on me and my main colleagues of Project Xanadu, portraying us as contemptible, delirious, incoherent, deluded, misinformed, ignorant clucks — saying, subtly, cleverly, and indirectly, that our work was inane, pointless, futile, and asinine, born of misunderstanding and neurosis. While the above words are not the ones he uses, they are the author's exact intended meaning. He's very careful not to say what he means, preferring to slander us by innuendo and hint and sneer, inviting the reader to connect the dots of his caricature from fragments he satirically selects. But I believe his intended meanings are absolutely clear and absolutely dishonest. I imagine that somewhere in his notes he has a basis for each individual sentence, but the sentences all together create a vivid and vicious tapestry of misrepresentation.
Okay, a brief introduction — an introduction to the situation. I am not a programmer. I'm a producer-director of software, like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and many others we don't know, some of whom succeed but most of whom don't. I've developed and delivered a number of pieces of software, but the only software I've designed that the public has seen is the back button. Seems obvious now, but I had to fight for it back in the day. There are a lot of fights in software development. It's extremely political, and unless you can program a package all by yourself, you have to fight for every part of it, all the way.
I started in the computer field as a media guy in 1960, with a background in publishing and theater, and immediately predicted many things that came true. I've been right about a great deal where people thought I was crazy — like worldwide publishing between interactive screens and a personal computer industry. In 1960 I got a lot of these ideas right away: new forms of writing for the computer screen, which I later called hypertext, and which I envisioned as the world's new form of writing.
My kind of hypertext is a new form of writing and document where every quotation that you're reading on this page is connected, side by side, visibly, to its original context. So this is what you would see on the screen — the page you're reading — and when you want to see the origin of a quotation, a beam, a visible beam, connects the quotation you're reading to its position in its original context. Not like what we have now. And many other visible connections are possible. So here's the page you're reading; here is a footnote, connected on the screen by a visible beam; here is a comment on this, over here, in a parallel position, connected by a visible beam; here is a portion that someone is disagreeing with, and here is a visible beam to the disagreement. Not like what we have presently today.
So for many difficult years I've had a project with two aspects: a way to view and work with documents, as I've just shown, side by side, with visible connections between them, and, for many tough decades, a plan to make this into a worldwide electronic publishing system. So this idea had two aspects — the new form of writing, which most people can't imagine yet, and the plan to network this new form of writing across the world. We screwed up big time, lost our opportunity in pole position, and instead our intended place was taken by the World Wide Web, which we see as a dumbed-down version of our document system — not half the hypertext that we designed. So the worldwide niche is taken, but I'm still trying to get the document system working as an optional alternative to today's text systems, which simulate paper instead of deep structure.
Our story is interesting and painful, and can be told in many different ways. It's all about spin. Wired's assassin spins us, presents us as idiotic. He is a master spin doctor — he is the Mengele of spin doctors. I have met half a dozen people who first read about me in the article, and without exception they all expressed astonishment that I was not the delirious buffoon the article had led them to expect.
The piece is mainly aimed at me, but intended to destroy my reputation, my career, and indeed my life — an unrelenting, snarling, sarcastic attack on the whole of my life and work, at least that work that the author cares to acknowledge, with considerable damage to my friends and colleagues as well. The piece is one long sneer, a fun-house mirror of disgrace, a torrent of uncalled-for and gratuitous insults — quote, "merciless condescension," to use the author's own felicitous phrase — decorated with factoids of his choice, colorful details tarted up to look relevant to his accusations but carefully pruned to present stick-figure caricatures of us.
Everything is described with incredible nastiness. The viciousness and malice that smolder in this piece, the endless sneer and smear of his descriptions, make it different from any other computer article ever written. I'm sure it is the nastiest piece ever published in the computer field, and the only such attack on a technical concept. Never in computer history has there been published such a nasty treatment of people, or such a nasty treatment of an idea.
Then there are all the omissions — not obvious, since they aren't there — crucial omissions, cavernous omissions, throughout the piece, of the things most honest journalists would have felt compelled to mention. You could say that his piece is made of omissions the way lace is made of holes, to use another of his phrases.
The piece is aptly called "The Curse of Xanadu" because it does exactly that: casting a curse on our work and our lives, promulgating a myth of our ignorance and stupidity that many people accept, like Griswold's story of Poe. As a result of this, I believe, on the basis of hate mail I receive and comments on the web, that I am the most hated person in the computer field. This was intentional. Though the author affects an Alice-in-Wonderland attitude — Alice kept saying "curiouser and curiouser" without judging — he is not there to report, but to judge, indeed to destroy.
The central fact of "The Curse of Xanadu" is that the author, Gary Wolf, hates Ted Nelson and wants the reader to hate me too, slanting everything and using every conceivable trick to achieve this — slanting everything in sarcastic slurs, with malice in every description. You could do that with anybody's life, but he takes special zest in doing it to mine.
Wolf hates everything about me, especially that I take a lot of notes and take a lot of video snippets, and uses this as an excuse to present me as a demented sicko, making up stories of how my mind works, fictions about my inner life, imaginary descriptions of what goes on in my head. I am, he says, a quivering wimp with a worthless mind, living in terror because I am unable to control my thoughts. He describes seething neurotic experiences that only he has experienced, in the terrifying tours through my mind that he has taken in his own imagination.
He implies throughout the piece that I am ignorant and confused and didn't understand computers, whereas at all times I have known exactly what I was doing, and I believe that virtually all of my technicalities have been correct. He also claims that my Xanadu project is dead, because he wants it to be. Not only does he announce the death of the Xanadu project, but he attempts to ensure it, as judge, jury, and executioner. Nevertheless, I continue to stagger on with the simplified version.
The piece is a fire hose of insults and slurs, including attacks on technical ideas he does not understand, errors, omissions, twisted misstatements, and, I believe, a few outright lies.
Now, journalists can always screw you. The question is how hard they work at it and how much they care. The ingenuity and talent that Wolf turns to this hate campaign are awesome. Here's a craftsman of hate, of cunningly arranged slurs and innuendos, of misstatements and omissions, and, I believe, lies, hiding the black hole of his hatred while pulling the reader into it. Wolf is an extremely clever and talented writer. It is unfortunate that he turns this talent to evil, like Leni Riefenstahl.
Now, careful readers recognize the piece as a hatchet job, but casual and careless readers do not. They take it as definitive, some final epitaph of me and my work. The takeaway that most casual readers leave with is that I and my main colleagues were slap-happy, deluded, misinformed, ignorant clucks, and that I in particular am a deranged, empty-headed, delirious, uninformed, misguided, incoherent, uncomprehending, asinine, ignorant clown and braggart, unacquainted with the principles of computers, and that my life and ideas are worthless — though out of the other side of his mouth, the author frequently acknowledges their influence.
While the above words are not the words he uses, they are the author's exact intended meaning. What he seems to say, what he gets across, is a sweeping tissue of untruth, and I believe he knows it. I believe he confects a picture he knows to be completely false. He sets himself up as judge, jury, and executioner of my colleagues and me, my life, my work, and what I believe in most. The principal objective of the article is to destroy my reputation, my life, and my career with smears and accusations. The rest of my team, except for Roger Gregory, got off more lightly.
He is careful not to say what he means, but I believe his meanings are absolutely clear and absolutely libelous. If I had been in the USA when it was published, I would have sued Wired for libel, acting as my own attorney, and even though his meanings are presented in an indirect and weaselly fashion, they are the intended thrust of this article — extremely dishonest and extremely damaging. So what will follow is essentially what I would have presented to the court.
But first, who gave the order? This twerp, Gary Wolf, would not have perpetrated the article on his own. The execution order had to come from higher up — I'll mention why later. So someone must have said, "Hit these guys so hard they never get up again." I believe Wolf was just the trigger man, a hired gun instructed to destroy us but extremely good at his job, fleshing out and embellishing a line of libel that somebody else fed him. So who were the real perpetrators?
Suspicion would, of course, first fall on the magazine's editor. The editor of Wired at that time was Kevin Kelly, but I don't think he gave the execution order. I've always considered Kelly a dimwit, from conversations at the Whole Earth Review and from the time I went paintballing with him and his women from his church, by only, by his invitation — an enjoyable but totally surreal experience. Over drinks I once tried to explain my document structure to him, and he dismissed it as weird. That did not enhance my view of Kelly's intellect. So I considered Kevin Kelly a dimwit, but an amiable dimwit — he wouldn't have instigated such a vicious attack.
Suspicion thus falls on my former pretend friends, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf, the founders and, at that time, publishers of Wired. Now, I had considered Louis and Jane to be among my best friends. I had stayed with them in Amsterdam, we went to movies together, I'd taken them kayaking on the bay, Marlene and I had them to our place for dinner only a year before the article. I think I loved their previous magazine, Electric Word, and when they were putting out mock-ups of their new magazine, Wired, I even considered investing — I had money at the time — but I was revolted by the mock-up and its shallow, sloganeering slant, substituting garage layout and headlines for content. But apparently Louis was in touch with popular taste.
Nevertheless, out of friendship, once Wired had started up, I wore their advertising buttons and caps that said "Get Wired," in orange and black. Jane came to our going-away party when Marlene and I left for Japan, but Louis stayed away. I sensed some hostility from him. Louis knew I had a crush on Jane, but it was a passive matter, hardly a threat to their relationship. I thought we were still all friends.
Then Louis and Jane published this article with malice of forethought, in full knowledge of the consequences for my life and career. There have been dark-edged conjectures, but I'll stop there and figure it was probably Louis who gave the execution order. I think it was simple schadenfreude — they all do — the human lust to kick someone when he's down, and I was way down after Autodesk killed their version of the Xanadu project.
Just before the attack came out, Jane set me up. She said they were going to give the piece a big treatment — she emailed us enthusiastically in Japan, saying that Wired was going to do a big production of their article on the Xanadu project, and I was so excited. I thought at last people will find out our side of the story, our originality, determination, and heroism. I thought they'd show our bravery, ingenuity, and depth, and explain why our idea of side-by-side electronic documents was so much more powerful than today's paper simulation. At last we would get a decent hearing. At last people would understand what we were trying to do, that was so much deeper than conventional software.
Then out came this vicious, twisted piece. It turned out Jane had just been setting me up, positioning me for the firing squad. It was a staggering betrayal of friendship — not just a friendship betrayed, not just a kick in the teeth, not just a stab in the back, but both barrels below the belt. The only precedent I can think of is the Roman soldier Sejanus, who pretended to be the best friend of the Emperor Tiberius and surreptitiously murdered his son, hoping to become the next emperor. This article is on that level of friendship betrayed.
After the publication, Jane played innocent with my wife, Marlene. She claimed that they had just given it to a good writer and taken a hands-off position. How disingenuous can you get? She must have been laughing up her sleeve, because both Louis and Jane knew what they were doing to our lives, especially mine, with this vicious piece of crap.
It's not as if Wired was above considering the consequences of what they published. I have heard and believed that they cancelled a piece saying John Sculley had destroyed Kodak, because he threatened to sue. So editorial policy was not ironclad. Based on what they knew would be the consequences of the article, they might have reconsidered, or at least offered me a chance for rebuttal. But after the piece came out, the bastards would not even print my reply. I put various refutations on the net, but nobody reads them — hence this video, covering a level of detail I think is important, to settle all these imputations before I die, and clarify and exonerate the fundamental idea Wolf has tried so hard to destroy.
The Arc of the Piece
Here is the arc of the piece. Here is what Gary Wolf wants you to think, told in anecdote and innuendo — the impression everyone goes away with:
One: Hi, I'm Ted Nelson, a contemptible, tormented sicko whose writhing neuroses mysteriously created an important idea. This idea was not created by my mind, which he repeatedly indicates is worthless, but by various internal miseries seething therein, which he has invented.
Two: My contemptible Xanadu project is the biggest failure in computer history.
Three: I, contemptible Ted Nelson, never finish anything.
Four: My contemptible 1979 team was a bunch of deluded nitwits.
Five: The contemptible Xanadu idea and our main design of 1979 was impossible and idiotic, delirious, delusional crap.
Six: Roger Gregory, my contemptible dear friend and colleague, is another tormented sicko whose continued efforts on the project are symptoms of misery and actual madness.
But all these separate accusations are merely tentacles of the one big lie that we will deal with at the end. However, I will begin answering these charges piecemeal. I must now, at tedious length, both for you and for me, answer the Wolf/Wired charges with various specifics, which I believe will show Wolf for what he really is. There is no time to read you the whole article, or all the smears and slurs and misstatements, so I will have to present a select few. I believe they will show not only Wolf's nastiness, which is hardly an issue, but his dishonesty, which is the crucial point — for he masquerades as a journalist rather than a killer.
Okay, here we go. I'm going to read you the specifics of Wolf's indictment — a series of quotes from the article, Wolf's accusations against me and my colleagues — then I will analyze and reply to them. There's far too much to include; I've cut this down as much as possible, I've changed the sequence into the order in which I wish to analyze them and reply, and I've also shortened some of Wolf's sentences to certain points or clauses without changing the meaning in any way. I'm going to try to hold down my emotions, but I'm a very emotional man, and this attack by Wired magazine and my former friends has been the most emotional issue of my entire life.
Accusation One: The Biggest Failure in Computer History
One — let's start with the accusation that my contemptible Xanadu project is the biggest failure in computer history. Among Wolf's uncalled-for and gratuitous insults, he calls me, quote, "the king of unsuccessful software development," unquote. I have numerous competitors for that title, but the people who attempted to create those other big projects that I'm about to name are treated like heroes for what they attempted — but not us of the Xanadu project. We have been made scapegoats, especially by Gary Wolf.
He asserts that Xanadu is the biggest failure in computer history: quote, "Xanadu has set a record of futility that will be difficult for other companies to surpass," unquote. That shows he doesn't know a lot of computer history. It's true that my main project isn't working yet, but there have been thousands of unsuccessful projects. To name some big, important, and famous ones that Wolf certainly should have known about:
In the 1960s, the ILLIAC IV, a huge computer for its day at the University of Illinois, was supposed to be a time-sharing system for the whole country, or at least the whole Department of Defense. It took millions of dollars and, I believe, hundreds of man-years of programmers. Only one quarter of it ever worked.
If I remember correctly, in the 1990s Time Warner announced the rollout of what was to be an entertainment system for millions of homes, on which they spent many millions of dollars. Then it was delayed and delayed, and sometime in the 1990s they announced that it would be tested in one neighborhood, after which nothing further was heard.
The Japanese Fifth Generation Computer project, in the 1980s, absorbed hundreds of millions of yen, possibly hundreds of billions of yen, and fell completely flat. It was supposed to unify, under artificial intelligence, vast pieces of hardware using the Prolog language, which has not fulfilled expectations.
Douglas Lenat's CYC project — that's spelled C-Y-C — a huge artificial intelligence project in Texas, has absorbed many millions of dollars and has been a very great disappointment, not the least to Doug Lenat.
Microsoft Longhorn was a mess and a failure. When Ballmer retired just now as head of Microsoft, he said it was his biggest mistake. It cost Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars and involved hundreds of programmers — a lot bigger than the Xanadu effort.
MobileMe was a cloud package that Apple rolled out early, as cloud storage was beginning. It became a disaster and was discontinued. Millions of dollars lost there.
But I would say the champion is the U.S. anti-ballistic missile system, which has had many names over the last half century, including ABM, and Star Wars, and Safeguard. Anyway, while it involves rockets and warheads, which work, its heart is a software project that has been going on since the 1960s — in other words, about as long as the Xanadu project — has absorbed hundreds of programmers and billions of dollars, and has yet to work. It has had a lot of propaganda value; Margaret Thatcher thought that Reagan's commitment to the ABM system ended the Cold War, but the Russians couldn't have been that stupid. Cynics believe it will never hit a barn door. The problem is to evaluate, in software and in very real time, many complex and subtle radar signals among phony radar signals which have been sent there to distract, detect an oncoming missile, figure out where it is, choose whether to launch, and when, and at what, and in midair or mid-space, and then, at closing speeds of thousands of miles per hour, the software must decide, either on the ground or on the missile, when to detonate, with only milliseconds — perhaps microseconds — of tolerance. Won't go on. Anyway, the rocket part works fine, and it may someday work against one incoming rocket, or a few.
Okay, other not-yet-successful projects include illustrious failures — very good ideas which haven't worked yet, like Xanadu document structure. The Transputer, engineered in England as hardware along with the brilliant Occam language by Tony Hoare and others, whose security and networking features far outstrip conventional computer architectures, but the Intel juggernaut, with all the security holes that create so many of our present network dangers, rolls on. Capability-based security — all the knowledgeable people agree that this is the only way to go, but again the standard computer architecture rolls on. And if you know about Doug Engelbart's work, you could call that a failure, in that only a few parts of it were adopted and ninety percent of his great vision has gone unheeded — just because he invented multiple windows on the screen, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, etc., most people consider Douglas Engelbart a great success. But he didn't; he considered himself a failure. All his later designs, after his watershed demo in 1968 — in other words, most of his work — have been ignored. So there's a record of thirty years of futility, by his own evaluation.
So there have been many blighted endeavors in computer history, at great cost to many people, governments, and corporations, and for Wolf to crown us as paramount shows how little research he has done in his eager malice.
Accusation Two: A Bunch of Deluded Nitwits
Okay, next accusation. Two — now for the accusation that my contemptible team of 1979 was a bunch of deluded nitwits. I'm speaking here of my 1979 team, whom Wolf makes such sport of. The team described later in the article, redesigning in the 1980s at Autodesk, they were not my team, and they were going in their own directions. I'm talking about the true team of 1979.
He derides us thusly — here's the main quote about our work in 1979: quote, "Nelson became convinced that they were making major contributions to computer science. He believed that the newest versions of the data-search algorithms, dubbed "General Enfilade Theory," allowed the Xanadu system to grow forever without its performance degrading unacceptably. Most computer scientists would have been suspicious of these claims, but this hardly bothered these programmers, who were working in an atmosphere of friendly competition and camaraderie. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Henry V: we few, we slap-happy few, we band of brothers," unquote.
Okay, let's talk about this team. They were, and are, extremely smart. Mark Miller everyone knows is a genius. Stuart Greene was teaching holography when he was fourteen. Eric Hill hacked into a bank security system when he was fifteen — this was very rare thirty-five years ago; the judge laughed him out of court, congratulating him on his ingenuity, but that was thirty-five years ago and he didn't do any harm. Roland King was a talented linguistic theorist, especially versed in the arcane area of tagmemics, an extremely interesting formulation of linguistic theory which has been pushed aside by the Chomsky model, but which I believe still has important consequences.
Then there's Roger. In Wolf's presentation, Roger Gregory, my contemptible dear friend and colleague, is a tormented sicko whose continuing efforts on the project are symptoms of misery and actual madness. The treatment of Roger in this article is particularly vicious and savage. In his despicable treatment of Roger, Wolf takes his role as a hatchet man seriously; his pretense of being a journalist wears thin as he tears my friend and colleague to shreds.
He begins by saying Roger is sad. Yes, Roger is sad and angry, as I am, because political and corporate mess-ups have denied us the system of documents we want to use in our work and lives.
Now, here's a good one. Wolf says of Roger's bookshelves, quote, "His bookshelves were overwhelming. So much anxiety was collected there — dust-covered, unread books, books piled behind other books. The arch-hacker had built himself a barricade of books, a paper dike against a flood of sorrow," unquote. Only Gary Wolf can look at a bookshelf and see anxiety and sorrow. Those of us who love books see books.
Now, for Wolf's imputation of Roger's incompetence: Wolf keeps calling Roger a, quote, "repairman," because he once held such a job. Would you call Philip Glass a, quote, "cab driver," because he did that for a while? You could just as well call Roger a rocket scientist, because, yes, Roger has patented a rocket engine.
Wolf tries to disguise the depth of Roger's intellect when he says, quote, "While he knew how to fix and program computers pretty well, he was not a computer scientist or an elite researcher," unquote. If by "elite researcher" he means highly paid, that's right. But what makes him think Roger is not a computer scientist? Does Wolf have the slightest idea what a computer scientist is?
Wolf says the following with a straight face — this is a long technical quote. He says that Roger and Mark, quote, "created an addressing system that used transfinite numbers, an arcane area they both studied in college. They called the new addresses tumblers. The tumbler system allowed readers to create links to any arbitrary span of bytes. With tumblers, Miller and Gregory could give a similar address to every document and fragment of a document in Xanadu's domain of words, pictures, movies, and sounds. The address would not only point the reader to the correct machine; it would also indicate the author of the document, the version of the document, the correct span of bytes, and the links associated with these bytes," unquote. This description is correct. So how can Wolf say that with a straight face and pretend that Roger is not a computer scientist? He doesn't even know what a computer scientist is.
I'll read the damning phrase again: quote, "Nelson became convinced that they were making major contributions to computer science. He believed that the newest versions of the data-search algorithms, dubbed "General Enfilade Theory," allow the Xanadu system to grow forever without its performance degrading unacceptably. Most computer scientists would have been suspicious of these claims, but this hardly bothered these programmers, who were working in an atmosphere of friendly competition and camaraderie," unquote. "Most computer scientists would have been suspicious" — is it possible that we actually were computer scientists? I'll give you a hint: my official title, as I speak, is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Chapman University — that's Chapman, C-H-A-P-M-A-N, University, an exciting, inspiring place.
Now, I never claimed to be a computer scientist. I thought computer scientists dealt with irrelevant stuff, like recursive calls to Fibonacci series, which had nothing to do with my concerns of text interaction or user experience. But now it seems I am widely acknowledged to be a computer scientist. Well, in that case I can assure you that even more so were my colleagues of 1979: Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Eric Hill, Roland King. So now I can say authoritatively that the tumbler work and general enfilade theory were indeed computer science. And note that enfilades now have a Wikipedia page which discusses general enfilade theory, and I just found that there's a Wikipedia page on tumbler addressing.
We'll say more about the legitimacy of this work later, but my team were emphatically not merely a bunch of enthusiastic nitwits, as Wolf wants you to believe.
Accusation Three: The Business Maneuvers
Okay, next accusation. Three — now for Wolf's accusation, Wolf's description of our business maneuvers, which he wants you to think were insane: quote, "Xanadu, the greatest encyclopedic project of our era, seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness," unquote. With his pretend Alice attitude, Wolf describes our business maneuvers, from beginning to end, as sheer idiocy. Because of his omissions, what does he leave out? He leaves out the whole real story. Here's the real story, which of course he doesn't want to tell you.
Part one: doing it without backers. From when I began in the computer field, I wanted a company, my own, that I could run my way. From the beginning I saw the necessity of starting the company on a shoestring, without investors. This was the strategy later used by Jobs starting Apple, by Gates and Allen starting Microsoft, by Brin and Page starting Google. They would never have made it big if they'd had backers. The whole point was that they got to profitability without backers, and therefore got to do it their way — though I started long before they did. I knew the trade-off well: either staying in control of the project, or getting backers and watching it go to hell, if you care what you're doing and it's not narrow and trivial to explain — like, say, John Warnock explaining PDF to investors. Everyone is going to want to change it. As I explained in Possiplex, my attitude is that of the low-budget filmmaker, like John Cassavetes.
Part two: the Silver Agreement and its collapse. What I wanted was my own company — in particular, I wanted to offer a particular kind of online publishing of parallel connected texts, with the freedom to quote in any quantity under legitimate copyright, and keep every quotation connected to its original source, which was unheard of. This vision was not something others would care about so much. Roger Gregory, who had brilliantly coached the 1979 team under my direction — taking over and handling all the details — wanted his own company too. That turned out to be fine, since his technicalities would exactly underpin my publishing vision. A guy named Phil Salin worked out the perfect arrangement, not a compromise but a neat division — the Silver Agreement, dividing Xanadu between the company I wanted to run and the company Roger wanted to run. That was fine.
Wolf thinks he got this completely wrong. Wolf thinks the contract was signed at Autodesk; actually, it was signed years earlier, in San Antonio, and it was my absolute condition for giving up creative control of the technical side, and later it was my absolute condition for getting into the Autodesk deal. But then Roger lost control of his company, and it all went to hell. Autodesk backed Xanadu, and the group that took over screwed up — others took over and made Xanadu their project, sprawling, undefined, and the vision that Roger and I shared was smashed into a thousand pieces. What followed became a nightmare. The software that would have defined worldwide publishing, instead of the web, was not finished, and it splintered into an unholy mess.
Part three: the Autodesk endgame. The Autodesk endgame, which Wolf seems to find so mindless and mystifying, was all about creative control. To me, it was still about getting my own company, which our contract, the Silver Agreement, had defined as the Xanadu publishing company. Once there was talk of recombining the publishing company with the technical company, it was the end of all my hopes. I wanted nothing to do with the company that was evolving; I did not care to run a department or debate with others who had different ideals. Xanadu was no longer my project — it had a lot of people with divergent ideas, nice guys, but not true to my vision, and only Roger was true to the vision, as far as I was concerned. And after that, I just wanted the trademark back, and the old code they had thrown away, so I could start over again without those other guys, and with Roger.
Wolf tells the story as if I was out to torpedo the Xanadu venture. No — that ship had already sunk, and I just wanted out of a corporate mess with incompatible partners.
Accusation Four: I Never Finish Anything
Next major accusation, most dire, is Wolf's implicit charge that I never finish anything, which he implies forcefully, in repeated hints. This is the most damaging accusation: quote, "Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes," unquote. This is a dire accusation with dire consequences for me, built over cavernous omissions. As far as what I've finished, he mentions only two of my books. That I have tried to do too much is clear — I've tried to do far more than others — but to imply, however, that I never finish anything is an outright lie.
Here are the details he supports it with. Quote, "He has written an unfinished autobiography and produced an unfinished film," unquote. Oh yeah, my film, "The Epiphany of Slocum Furlough," was finished long before he wrote the article. And here's the autobiography. Here's a good one: he says that my house is full of, quote, "unfinished notes," unquote. What the hell is an unfinished note? Notes are by definition unfinished, are they not?
Now, my boyhood heroes Walt Disney and Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller had lots of unfinished projects. So did my hero of later years, Orson Welles. What's that — you say they finish things? Yeah, right.
Does Wolf mention that I've finished anything besides those two books he mentions? Does he mention my main discoveries and inventions, or the backstory of my project life? These are his most cavernous omissions. What have I finished that any honest journalist might consider mentioning, at least in part? Oh, I finished a lot less than I wanted to, so far, but a lot more than Wolf wants you to think.
Does he mention the following: that I've got three patents; that I've published seven books; that I've published over fifty articles, ten of which were peer-reviewed — thank you very much, which is twice as hard; that I edited a national magazine for a year; that I published years of columns in different magazines and a newspaper; that I've given over a hundred lectures in over a dozen countries; that I've taught and graded over five hundred university students; that I've put up lots of videos, including my "Computers for Cynics" series, so far two hours worth, which comes to feature length, and what odds will you give me that I'm going to finish this video; does he mention that I've completed and delivered thirty operational software projects, my designs implemented under my supervision, listed on page 372; that I've made six principal inventions or discoveries? It's hard to distinguish between an invention and a discovery — take the telephone, it was a startling invention at the time, but now it just seems like a discovery.
Okay, so: in 1960 or '61, indirect documents with visible transclusions — that's the Xanadu structure. In 1962 or 1963, I invented a method of curving over triangles for photorealistic computer graphics, that is, not using Bezier functions or Coons patches, but just curving over the triangles by algorithm — work that I don't think was replicated for another twenty years — triangular representation of 3D objects and smoothing over them, for photorealistic computer graphics and movies, and now photorealistic video-game computer gaming, since that's at such high speed. In the 1960s I came up with the enfilade, an indexing structure for editing documents stored as external pieces — if you look up "enfilade" in Wikipedia, the one I invented is the Model T. It's what makes Xanadu documents of the 1979 design technically possible, and, by the way, Bill Duvall tried it at Xerox PARC and found that indirect editing of stored content is more efficient than the conventional method, which I had suspected. Those are my inventions from the 1960s.
Since then, three more: the ZigZag database — a hyper-orthogonal database, ZigZag being my trademark, a database system with remarkable properties; a multidimensional graphics engine called the Zoggle, combining ZigZag structure and an OpenGL interpreter for smooth tweening among N choices, inside the Xanadu Space prototype; and a system of automatic file merging that interweaves elements of different files when they are co-resident, and separates them when the files are dismissed — got the patent on that one. Not to mention my most deployed invention, the back button. Didn't know that was an invention, did you? I had to fight for it at Brown University around 1967. But don't call that a technical invention, it's an interface, and I'm skipping all my interface contributions, which aren't inventions — I consider them an art form.
[Make sure the camera's running. Seems to be.]
Okay, in Wolf's accusations about my not finishing, he's left out the whole backstory — a cavernous omission. My project Resolve, of 1959, described in Possiplex. In college I was a project tornado, doing many projects, despite Wolf's claim of my tiny attention span. By the way, how is my attention span doing tonight? We're — what — half an hour into the video at least, yet I have not begun to jibber. How can that be?
So, projects in college: my own magazine, for three issues — that's called success for a little magazine, I had a very little magazine. Here is "Nothing Number One," with wonderful illustrations by Russ Ryan, which I commissioned. "Nothing Number Two," with more illustrations by me, not so many by Russ. And "Nothing Number Three," the grand, the great finale, "The Kite-Shaped Nothing," with purple-and-black print, and you had to keep rotating it as you turned the pages, and this had many wonderful illustrations by Russ Ryan.
So, and, uh, what else did I do? I wrote — won a prize-winning one-act play, acted in another; I had my own newsletter; I had a weekly column for a year; I wrote and directed the first rock musical (look on the web), not a rock opera, but a rock musical, that is, a musical is a play where people burst into song from time to time. I wrote the book and lyrics and commissioned the music, with various rock numbers from an excellent freshman composer named Dick Kaplan. Here is the program from my rock musical — creating the program was almost as much trouble as writing and directing the play. Again, picture by Russ Ryan. This was 1957. The official rock-musical lists, such as the Wikipedia page called "Rock Musical," don't include it, and start later.
In college I also produced a long-playing record, published my first book, and shot my movie, a half-hour film — a comedy — entitled "The Epiphany of Slocum Furlough," which you can watch on the web. Most people can't stand the fact that it's badly synced, which was very hard to do in those days, and that it's slow-moving and melancholy, and yet tries to be a comedy. Well, to each their own.
I did a lot of projects at college with my tiny attention span, managed to graduate in four years, but this led to a great resolve. Does Wolf mention that, based on that college experience, I decided I was a project person? I wanted to do projects all my life, especially projects involving writing, theater, printing, photography, movies, each one as different as possible from the previous, and I expected to keep a lot going at once. So I took an industrial approach to projects, expecting to have many unfinished projects at the same time, or, I prefer the term, ongoing.
My entire industrial approach to personal project management included note-taking, workflow dynamics, manuscript systems, so I could start and maintain many projects simultaneously, working out procedures for starting projects, carrying unfinished projects from place to place, forking one project into two, joining two projects into one, and organizational systems for naming, filing, connecting, and all this was before I knew anything about computers. When I learned about computers, my organizational systems became merged into the Xanadu concept: non-hierarchical structure, multiple reference without multiple copies, arbitrary interconnection, and so on.
So Wolf says of this relationship, quote, "All the children of Nelson's imagination do not have equal stature; each is derived from the one great unfinished project," which is Xanadu — not derived from it, but I would like it to organize them all. He quotes me as saying, quote, "The first step to anything I ever wanted to do was Xanadu." Well, that was after 1960, when I saw how it should be the center. After 1961 I got this new idea. I wanted it for everything, but not out of my "cringing, weepy neuroses" that Wolf invents, but because it's the best way to organize manuscripts and documents.
Another omission: as a generalist, I wanted to know about everything and find new ways to tie things together. I thought I might make contributions to other fields. Wolf calls this my, quote, "omnivorous fascination with trivia," and makes a point of ridiculing my ongoing work in other fields. My role model was Jean Cocteau, the French filmmaker who made "Beauty and the Beast" and was also an intellectual on the Paris scene. I saw no conflict between these occupations.
Another cavernous omission: my project Resolve, from 1959, about project dynamics. Projects have an arc of stages, from inspiration to confident condensation, but we won't talk about that right now. By the time I got out of college I knew a project has two main drivers: inspiration and momentum. So my project system, indeed my life, had to be built around inspiration and momentum, as follows.
One: inspiration is sacred and must get immediate attention without evaluation, because it can be lost so quickly. Therefore any new idea must be written down immediately, interrupting whatever else is happening. If this looks crazy to other people, I don't care.
Two: momentum, being on a roll. A project takes a long time to build momentum, and when you get that momentum you must keep it going or suffer a serious setback. Anyone who's written a term paper knows this; architects call it a charrette; programmers know it deeply, they speak of the amount of state you have to have in your mind; one author got famous for calling it flow — I think his name is pronounced Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I just call it momentum.
So I built my life around projects, inspiration, and momentum, and this is the source of what people consider my eccentricities.
Accusation Five: A Tormented, Neurotic Sicko
Now for the infuriating accusation — number five, taking it as number five — now for the infuriating accusation that I, Ted Nelson, am a contemptible, tormented sicko whose writhing neuroses mysteriously created an important idea. Here are his descriptions of my inner states of mind: quote, "tormented by his own faulty memory," unquote; quote, "the thought that some mental connection or relationship might dissolve was unbearable. The constant churn and dispersal of his own thoughts was personally devastating," unquote; quote, "the inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced," unquote.
Wow — tormented, unbearable, devastating, helpless, frantic. How pathetic. How did I get through my college studies and do all those projects with those terrible miseries going on in my mind? Those miseries are in Wolf's mind, not mine. What I wanted was the better ways of writing and organizing that Xanadu structure would bring — not water wings to save my drowning soul. He has made all that up.
Here's another misstatement of my objectives, based on his imagined experience and my twisted miseries: Nelson, quote, "wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic flux so that it could be reconstructed as needed," unquote. No — I wanted a system capable of representing any chaotic flux, and for better keeping track of history and interconnection. If it can represent anything, then it can represent whatever you want, but let's make sure it can represent anything — that's the hard part.
Now here's a corker — every part of the following sentence is false: quote, "Nelson, with his unfocused energy, his tiny attention span, his omnivorous fascination with trivia, and his commitment to recording incidents whose meaning he will never..." unquote. Analyze every one of those clauses — every one is false.
Here's another interpretation of my pathetic neuroses: quote, "Nelson, a lonely child raised in an unconventional family, became a rebel against forgetting, and a denier of all forms of loss and grief," unquote. A denier of all forms of loss and grief — I don't think so. There's plenty of life, loss, and grief in my life, and I do not deny it. Am I denying the grief of this Wired article?
Here's another bizarre misstatement: "Nelson had no interest in the smooth, progressive narratives encased in books." Excuse me — I love books, I have hundreds of them, possibly thousands, and I believe I've written a lot of smooth, progressive narratives myself, but I think that parallel hypertext can be better.
Okay, now let's talk about the rowboat story. The two greatest insults in "The Curse of Xanadu" are, one, Wolf's constant assertion, though implicit, of my ignorance, and, two, his sneering attack on the central religious experience in my life, which occurred when I was five years old. How many people get to have their childhood and their religion attacked in print simultaneously?
Defining moments: my hand in the water, 1942 or 1943 — probably spring 1943, when I was five. I trailed my hand in the water as my grandfather rowed, my grandmother was in the front of the boat, wearing high heels as always — that's dubious, I was four or five, and this was spring 1943 at the latest. We were in Chicago. Fuzzy shapes passed underneath. I studied the water's crystal softness. The water was opening around my fingers, gently passing around them, then closing again behind. I considered the different places in the water and the connections between them — the places that, at one instant, were next to each other, then separated as my fingers passed, then rejoined, but no longer in quite the same way. How is it, I wondered, that every instant's arrangement in the water and the world can be so much the same as just before, and yet so different? How could even the best words express this complexity? How could even the best words express what systems of relationships were the same and different, and how many relationships there were? I could not have said "relationships" or "systems" then, let alone "particles" or "manifolds" or "higher-level commonalities," but those were my exact concerns. My questions and confusions were always exact, and fine distinctions concerned me greatly. They still do.
In this book I will try to say exactly what I was thinking at different times — exactly, that is, in my vocabulary of now. And how, you might ask, do I remember those floating, swirling thoughts over sixty years ago? Because these are matters I've thought about ever since, in thousands of different ways, and I reconnect them even now with that early moment of floating, crystalline study — the rattle of oarlocks, sun-twinkle on the water, my grandmother clearing her throat, the thump of oars, my grandfather's earnestness, all with me as I write, in the eternal now and then.
Speaking now in the present: that religious experience, the moment of my hand in the water, is with me always. Always I see the profusion of relationships, of connections, of ideas, of possibilities, as a great net across the world, across every subject, across everything. All my philosophical thoughts since then derive from that insight in the rowboat, or perhaps some fundamental pattern in my mind that first projected into the water — some strip of mental film projecting outward from my inner center, from which that insight came. The insight was sound: profuse connection is the whole problem of abstraction, perception, and thought. Profuse connection is the whole problem of expression, of saying anything — it is the problem of writing, it is the problem of seeing. We see and imagine so much more than we can express. Trying to communicate ideas requires selection from this vast, ever-expanding net. Writing on paper is a hopeless reduction, as it means throwing out most of the connections, telling the reader only the smallest part, in one particular sequence, and this is what I hope to fix, or at least improve, through most of my life — giving the world a greater and better way to express thoughts and ideas. And that is what this book is about. This book is about the story of my life and thoughts, and of connections, and it is about the connections among all life and thought, and how I have fought to bring about a better world of thought and its representation.
This was a big thought for a little boy — an epiphany, an ecstatic realization of resemblance, interconnection, and vastness, recognizing the universe as an unbounded manifold of interconnection, with changes always resembling past and future. But Wolf tries to twist this moment of awe and insight into a neurotic symptom, calling it a vision of, quote, "water disturbed." It was a vision of awe and magnificence — impersonal awe and magnificence, like seeing the ocean for the first time, but it was much more than the ocean, it was all the relations in the universe, in a widening zoom shot. Yet Wolf wants to make this a neurotic symptom, calling it "a vision of water disturbed." Was he there? No. Decades would pass before Gary Wolf was to befoul the planet with his presence. I'm talking like him now — I shouldn't, I need the moral high ground.
Let me just summarize by saying that to call this epiphany "water disturbed" is a grotesque misrepresentation of the fundamental religious experience and insight that was to define my life and work. The only disturbance in that experience was in Gary Wolf's twisted mind.
Other Nasty Slurs
Now there are other insults and misdescriptions of me we have to go through. Here are some nice, lying slurs.
The lunch trip through Sausalito. The first lie in "The Curse of Xanadu" is in the first sentence, where he tries to frame me as a scary driver. The article begins, quote, "I said a brief prayer as Ted Nelson took a scary left turn on Marin Boulevard in Sausalito." There is no Marin Boulevard in Sausalito, but never mind. He ends the trip by calling it "our brief but hair-raising journey toward lunch." Gosh — scary left turn, hair-raising journey. Well, according to a witness who was also in the car, it was an ordinary, tranquil trip to lunch. That witness, who ate with us that day, is the illustrious John R. Levine, principal author of "The Internet for Dummies" and sometime mayor of Trumansburg, New York. So, in describing our ordinary, tranquil trip to lunch as a hair-raising journey, Gary Wolf is either an incredible coward as a passenger, or gearing up the lies for the lies that are to follow. I'd say the latter. And, by the way, John Levine just emailed me describing Wolf's article as a "shaft job." And, also by the way, I believe I have driven some seven hundred thousand miles in my life, and no human being has ever been hurt.
Descriptions of me. You are no doubt aware that anything can be described in a complimentary or a nasty fashion. Wolf chooses the latter, always. Wolf calls me boastfully, quote, "boastfully buoyant," which I think means optimistic about the powers of side-by-side connected documents. He speaks of my, quote, "boastful proclamations," unquote — that simply means, I think, that I was describing the intended functions of the system we were building, and what we thought the system would do. Quote, "Nelson's speculative mania is indeflatable," unquote. I have been consistent all these years in my principles and designs — how is this a mania? And, by the way, my speculations of the early 1960s have been confirmed across the board.
Here's a cute one. Wolf describes my participation in certain meetings as follows: quote, "Nelson would arrive from his Sausalito office and wave his hands furiously in front of the whiteboards." Why — what strange behavior — to wave my hands furiously in front of the whiteboards. Was I doing anything else? Was I, perhaps, speaking?
Then there are made-up stories of how I offended others. He says that I offended my professors: quote, "He put his teachers off with the theories of writer Alfred Korzybski." This is a fiction. I showed Korzybski's book to Michael Scriven, who wasn't interested, and to Jerome Shaffer, who read it and didn't like it. But neither of them was put off — Shaffer married my former girlfriend, and I had lunch with Scriven just last year.
Wolf says my proclamations, quote, "typified Xanadu since Nelson first started offending his professors," unquote. When did I offend any professors? This is a complete fiction, his made-up history. I got along extremely well with all my professors except one in college, and all my professors except one in graduate school. I think that's a good record.
Quote, "He put off computer scientists by taking every opportunity to inform them that they failed to understand the earth-shattering significance of their work." I'll repeat that — it's both fictitious and incomprehensible. Quote, "He put off computer scientists by taking every opportunity to inform them that they failed to understand the earth-shattering significance of their work." What is he talking about? When did I offend people by telling them their work was important? This is either a complete fiction or a misreading of his own notes. No, I'm not saying I never offended anybody, but that doesn't mean Wolf has a license to fabricate events.
He attributes strange views to me: quote, "Nelson developed the habit of asserting that only a technology for the preservation of all knowledge could prevent the destruction of life on earth." This is a fiction, he's made this up. I never said that, and I have no such habit of asserting that. Very strange.
My student film. He describes my student film, "The Epiphany of Slocum Furlough," as, quote, "an epic," unquote. This is a pointless slur — the movie is a melancholy mood piece. Why does he call it an epic, just to sneer?
Then there's my book, "Computer Lib." He says my book "Computer Lib," quote, "consisted of hundreds of individual rants." Excuse me, but about half of the book, which ran to hundreds of thousands of words, was exposition and explanation, and by "rants" he seems to mean my essays on software design, many of which are still good, and which may have been the first published writings on what is now called HCI, or human-computer interface. Wolf says, quote, "Computer Lib reflected back to computer programmers an idealized image of themselves; in this sense it was a far subtler book than Nelson set out to write," unquote. Of course I couldn't possibly have thought that out beforehand — Wolf wants to have my every thought of which he approves look like an accident. Within Wolf's view, I could not possibly have intended to do something intelligent.
Okay — Wolf ridicules me extensively for my eccentricities, but none of the rationales behind them. Remember, he doesn't want you to know what I think — indeed, he doesn't want you to know that I think.
The fangle. Let's take the issue of fangles. Wolf wants everything I do to sound sinister and stupid; fangles are an example. Wolf describes my filing system as having, quote, "specially cut file folders he calls "fangles" that begin their lives as 8 1/2-by-11-inch envelopes, are amputated en masse by a hired printer, and end up as integral components in Nelson's unique filing system." This is deadpan, but he means it to sound stupid — "amputated," "the evidence," "envelope" — sounds creepy, sounds like satanic practice, devil worship.
Now, Wolf doesn't want to tell you about the advantages of fangle filing; he wants it to sound stupid. Remember, he says nothing about the advantages of fangle filing compared with, say, Pendaflex — sorting into many categories. So if you have a box of Pendaflex, let's say twenty files open, you've got a pile of papers to sort, you find each folder and tuck it in, piecemeal. This becomes more and more time-consuming, exponentially, as you get more and more Pendaflex boxes — let's say you have ninety-six file folders open, so you've got to find the right one among ninety-six for what you're sorting.
Okay, the fangle system simplifies this. Okay, this is a fangle — you could also call it an L-cut folder. It's closed in an L shape on one side and open in an L shape diagonally across. You can put papers in it and see through them. These are sold throughout Europe and Asia, and sometimes you can get them in dollar stores here, but on the package it's usually called a "folder," which is confusing, because this is not what people normally mean by a folder. So I call it a fangle, short for "filing angle," to make it absolutely distinct from folders. Okay, now I use paper ones — here's a paper fangle, open on one, closed on the diagonal — closed in an L shape and open in an L shape.
Very useful for grouping papers — you can include them recursively, if you want to — and very good for sorting. Suppose I'm going through a box of stuff and I find a lot of things from different categories. Well, I don't have to find the places they're supposed to go, I don't have to go squirrel through a whole lot of folders to find the particular folder to put it in. Rather, I just write a description — let's say I find my father-in-law's picture of Roosevelt in the parade car, so I say, "Joe Stone's picture of FDR in parade car," and I give it a category too, if I want — I'll say "pics, 1940s." That would be a plausible category in my system. So what have I done? I now have — and then, of course, I would put the picture in there — I've got a title that I will recognize, and I've got a sorting category that will allow an assistant to go and do the sorting, that would have been so much more difficult in a box of Pendaflex file folders. Is that stupid? I don't say it's earth-shattering, but it is rationalized and clear and straightforward. And that is what Wolf doesn't want you to know.
The Xanadu franchises. Okay, here's another — here's a nice put-down that deserves analysis. I plan to finance a worldwide publishing system with my franchise — this was before any notion of the internet, this was before any notion of internet service providers, or the whole infrastructure we have now. I was shooting from the hip, based on what I knew would be available. In my book "Computer Lib," Wolf says I, quote, "pitch the idea of Xanadu information franchises, where data shoppers could access material from the global storage system," and he says, quote, "the Xanadu franchises were silly," unquote.
Now let's see — my idea was to finance a network of information stands by franchising. Hey, it worked for McDonald's. You could go to the Xanadu stand in person to get help from young technical guides, or you could access it remotely from home or office. The Xanadu stands would be connected in a network — connect to one, you'd connect to the whole — and there, if you went there, you'd be able to have coffee and snacks, back up your files, and publish whatever documents you chose, or you could do that from home. Let's see — this was, therefore, the first proposal for internet service providers, companies where you got an account and could publish and could pull down content, all of this from an ISP. We were saying Xanadu as the primo ISP, network storage now called cloud storage, internet café, coffee and connectivity. Well, that sure took off — that was the one that none of the Xanadu guys thought made any sense at all. And the Apple Genius — now you can go into the Apple Store and a smart guy will show you how to use things. Well, so those were concepts all built into and described in my writings about the Xanadu stand, including a comic strip. Anyway, what if this was silly? Which of these suggestions does Wolf think was silly? He could think anything was silly that he likes, but I'm kind of proud of having thought of all that.
My supposed ignorance. Quote, "The inventor's original hypertext design predicted most of the essential components of today's hypertext systems — sort of, that's what he said. Nonetheless, his talk to the Association for Computing Machinery had little impact. There was a brief burst of interest in this strange researcher, but although his ideas were intriguing, Nelson lacked the technical knowledge to prove that it was possible to build the system he envisioned, in nineteen sixty-five." Wrong — I wasn't talking about networking, it was my zippered-list system of, since 1965 — it was local and trivially simple. I didn't lack the technical knowledge, I lacked the wherewithal, I lacked the computer. And I'll repeat the key part: quote, "Nelson lacked the technical knowledge to prove that it was possible to build the system he envisioned." Where does he get that "lacked the technical knowledge" crap? I was a member of the ACM, I kept up with the Communications of the ACM, the Journal of the ACM, and Computing Surveys. I certainly knew the basics, and zippered lists were trivial.
Now for the biggie — sheer poetry. Quote, "Had Nelson been able to delve into the technical reasons for which computer people found his plans for Xanadu unconvincing, he might have been too discouraged to continue. The kinds of programs he was talking about required enormous memory and processing power; even today the technology to implement a worldwide Xanadu network does not exist. The notion of a worldwide network of billions of quickly accessible and interlinked documents was absurd, and only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy. The inventor was like a vaudeville performer practicing an acrobatic routine on the edge of an unseen cliff — a look into the abyss would doubtless have sent him tumbling." Sheer poetry.
This is all to deny me credit, so we're going to spend some time on this vacuous, clever, dirty tangle of associated accusations. The objective of this paragraph is to destroy any credit I might get from my main ideas — the fact that I thought of many aspects of personal computing long before everyone else, the fact that I imagined interlinked documents across the world before anyone else, my work in image synthesis, which he doesn't mention, now called CGI, my work in video editing by computer — he just skips over these, an omission.
So, quote, "the notion of a worldwide network of billions of quickly accessible and interlinked documents was absurd" — so when did it cease to be absurd? I never noticed. Quote, "only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy" — huh, it was incorrect to think about it then; when did it become correct? So I was wrong to be right — is this contorted, or what?
To continue: quote, "the inventor was like a vaudeville performer practicing an acrobatic routine on the edge of an unseen cliff — a look into the abyss would doubtless have sent him tumbling," unquote. Sheer poetry. I was designing the systems that would do it. The fundamental structure was clear, I had some of the parts right, but it would take my 1979 team to figure it all out.
Quote, "had Nelson been able to delve" — what an insult, I have been a delver all my life. This charge of ignorance infuriates me. When I started out I was aware of the proposals for data communication in the IBM world, and these would be good enough for the publishing system I was thinking about. There were no surprises that would have sent me off any cliff of his imaginings. Once again, quote, "only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy," unquote. We'll get back to this.
Accusation Six: The 1979 Design Was Impossible
The accusation we'll take now is number six: the contemptible Xanadu idea and our main design of 1979 was impossible and idiotic, delirious, delusional crap. The project made no sense, it would be a chaos of jumbled pieces since it was the product of sick minds, and at any rate could not have been done on the machines they were using. This is all [expletive].
The network was the large-scale objective, but not the structure in miniature. The structure in miniature was the connected documents with visible side-by-side connections. So when he refers to Xanadu as a global hypertext publishing system, that confuses it with today's World Wide Web, which was part of our original intent, but first of all it was a document format, a publication format and method — side-by-side parallel pages, visibly connected, with every quotation connected to its source, and many other connections possible — a different way of constructing writings, visible connections side by side. We didn't actually stress that it was documents connected side by side; we thought that was obvious, and besides, it was only one interface option. We explained these things badly, because we wanted to talk about all aspects, and most people were hardly ready for the first one.
On a small scale, the Xanadu model — I'm working up the Xanadu structure — is also a workflow system and an organizing tool for maintaining relations among many documents, a sweeping design for connecting text, audio, video in a uniform structure that can be shown many different ways, an organizing system where hierarchy is only one option. To paraphrase Einstein, quote, "everything should be as hierarchical as necessary, but no more so."
Now, normally journalists have a license to screw up technicalities, we all understand that, but because Wolf has gone for the jugular, his inaccuracies about the technicalities have to come under scrutiny. Here are some quotes from Wolf that show either his total ignorance of computers, or his intention to deceive, or both.
Referring to Xanadu again: quote, "the kinds of programs he was talking about required enormous memory and processing power; even today the technology to implement a worldwide Xanadu network does not exist," unquote. This is utterly incorrect, though it recapitulates a misunderstanding people had about Xanadu back in the '70s. It's not about memory and processing power, it's about servers and disks and networks — today's web servers, even yesterday's, are exactly the kinds of machines we were always designing for.
To quote Wolf again: quote, "the chief difficulty was creating a way to move data quickly in and out of the computer's memory, since hypertext links could connect infinitely many documents, every bit of writing in the system had to be instantly accessible," unquote. This is delirious — he's making some folk assumption that content has to be continually rolled in and out of memory. This is what enfilades are for — are Hadoop, in the general case, of what they're doing now — so our enfilades were equivalent to the big-data stuff they're doing now, in many ways. This is delirious. We're talking about a system that stores indexes and ships out large amounts of data, rather than looking at it all the time — pretty much the way the web does it, but with an entirely different structure. Sending out the content that's requested, and sending pointers to other servers to deal with further parts of a request. The difference for the web being the addressing structure: the web has URLs, we had tumblers, which addressed every content element — an entirely different way of seeing the world.
Wolf said, unquote, "only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy." No — in this case, quote, "only Wolf's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy." It is his vision of Xanadu that is chaotic and impossible.
Another incorrect quote: in Xanadu, quote, "there would be no immutable files, only a mass of materials that could be organized according to the reader's preference," unquote. Huh — this is exactly incorrect, in two different ways. He says there would be no immutable files; there would be only immutable files, from which content is sourced, and changeable lists of how to arrange and connect that content.
Okay, that does it for the arc of accusations.
The One Big Lie
I believe, and I think I have shown, that Gary Wolf is thoroughly dishonest and vicious. But it's only at the end that Wolf reveals his fascist aesthetic — what he loves above all are authority and neatness. Quote, "the lawn was perfectly trimmed, and it seemed to express the efficiency with which the unruly inspirations of myriad scientists are disciplined," unquote. This begins to explain why our sprawling and untidy endeavor affronted him so.
He also reveals, at the end, I think, that his real beef is against saving and remembering, though he puts the thought into the mouth of a guy named Rob Jellinghaus. Quote, "maybe forgetting is good," unquote — Jellinghaus says, but he is speaking for Wolf. So it turns out the piece is an elaborate polemic against archiving and historical knowledge. But because he is against remembering, Wolf tries to make my interest in remembering into some kind of neurosis. That's an argument not with me, but with the entire library and archival community, for which he makes me the designated scapegoat.
Now, some people are all for forgetting — the Nazis, for instance, burn books. Of course Gary Wolf is free to forget anything he likes — decency, honesty, integrity — and every liar and Nazi, like Gary Wolf, has the right to say anything in print. Note that that was a Gary-Wolf kind of sentence, his kind of tricky innuendo and slur. I said, quote, "every liar and Nazi like Gary Wolf" — you can interpret that in two ways. In one interpretation, I'm saying that Gary Wolf has the right to say anything, like every liar and Nazi. In another interpretation, when I say "every liar and Nazi like Gary Wolf," I might be implying that Gary Wolf is himself a liar and a Nazi. Which is it? You'll be the judge.
Okay, we're getting to the end — to the one big lie. Let's net it out. Only one thing matters if we are to evaluate Wolf's charges. The piece swirls around one black hole: the central accusation that the work of the Xanadu team in 1979 was ignorant, asinine crap, as Wolf so luxuriantly, so lavishly implies. In which case the piece can be taken as the symphony of revelation he intends, and that so many people want to believe.
Very well — all that matters in judging this piece and its accusations is the question of whether our Xanadu work in 1979 was coherent and workmanlike, let alone whether, as I believe, our work was deep, innovative, and sophisticated. Never mind that — the question is, did that work make sense at all? If so, our quirks don't matter, our untidiness doesn't matter, only the caliber of the work matters. As far as the accusations of neurosis are concerned, true or false, they are irrelevant — as the philosopher Karl Popper has emphasized, a person's background does not invalidate their ideas, which must be judged on their own merits. Consider, for example, Alan Turing — he got arrested in men's rooms, for God's sake, but that in no way invalidates his acknowledged brilliant work in mathematics, cryptography, and zebra stripes.
So if the work of the Xanadu team in 1979 and 1980 was reasonably thought out and a decent try by sensible thinkers, then Wolf's entire piece collapses into a single, underhanded, scoreless, reprehensible frame-up lie.
So how do we judge the merits of the fundamental Xanadu work — how can we establish the truth? Is there some authority we could go to? Why, yes, there is. Gary Wolf likes authority — let's see how he likes this one. Let's give the Wolf some authority he can knuckle under to. There is one man recognized the world over as the authority on algorithms.
After the Wired attack, I asked Don Knuth, the world authority on algorithms, if he would please go through the Xanadu algorithms with me and state, as an objective observer, whether they were based on, quote, "ignorance," unquote, or otherwise deficient, as alleged by Gory Jackal in that foul piece. By that time I had known Knuth for nearly forty years, in a way — in fact, we had both first been published nationally in the same journal: Mad Magazine. I read his first published piece when I was in college, though years later, when I was aware of him as a computer professional, I did not know it was the same person.
Shortly after the Wired attack, in 1995, Knuth agreed to review the work, but then he changed his mind and demurred — that was about 1996. Even though the attack was in 1995, the article still stands, smolders, and throws off its stink, and probably will forever. So rebutting it by every means is no small matter to me, and to the future of the Xanadu project. I did not give up on Knuth. However, uniquely in the world, he remains the authority on algorithms, and thus the unique voice to say that we of the Xanadu project were not ignorant fools.
I mulled over the question of how to get a testimonial from Knuth, and finally played the big card. I wrote to Don Knuth, asking his help, not as a computer scientist, but as a Christian. I had very mixed feelings about doing this, having been very anti-Christian at some times in my life, but there is apparently no reason that, as a generic person in distress, I could not avail myself of his Christian charity. Since he has retired from email, I FedExed him and pleaded for his help. I asked him to look at the Xanadu internals and some of my other technical work, as a Christian helping a fellow man.
He called the next day and offered to help immediately, inviting me to his home on the Stanford campus. He used to be quite macho — he has gotten much gentler. We spent two pleasant and intense hours at his house. I showed him my visual triumphs, Xanadu Space and ZigZag, but alas, he said visuals and interface don't mean much to him. What did that lead to showing? It led to various data structures and algorithms — especially enfilades, the Model T, and the tumbler, that I had discovered, and the internals of XU88 Xanadu that the other guys developed. Remember, I was trying to get vindication for the whole project, as well as myself, and the internals of ZigZag.
And what did Donald Knuth say? He said, "I saw nothing flaky."
If Knuth saw nothing flaky, who the hell is Gary Wolf to say otherwise? Gary Wolf said, as you may recall, quote, "only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy." The correct phrasing is, quote, "only Wolf's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy."
Is it possible to suppress an idea? Yes, it is. Take the case of John Gorrie — not the first to figure out the physics of refrigeration, but, I believe, the first man to actually make an ice cube, in the 1850s. He was hounded to death by Frederic Tudor, who ran the world ice monopoly from Massachusetts, and who managed to so disgrace John Gorrie that for another fifty years nobody would go near Gorrie's other idea, air conditioning. Can you destroy an idea? We don't even know what good ideas may have been actually destroyed in the past, whether by maneuvering like Frederic Tudor's, or by dishonest journalists.
Wolf has intended to destroy the enduring legacy of what we were building, except as it was dumbed down to the World Wide Web. In his extermination campaign against a technical and literary concept, and those who believe in it, Wolf was out to destroy an idea — possibly a very important idea, of documents visibly connected side by side. And at this crucial time in human history — I fear the last chapter of human history — we need all the good ideas we can get. By the time even my new, simple version of Xanadu is implemented and rediscovered by the new generation, it will be way too late for the many endeavors that needed it, and might have gotten it, were it not for Wolf's attack.
By disgracing the fundamental idea of side-by-side, parallel, connected pages, visibly connected, with every quotation connected to its source, he deprived the human race of something badly needed for perhaps two decades, leaving people wallowing in the irrelevant complications of Microsoft Word, and the sterile paper simulations of PDF, and the retrograde dumbing-down of e-books, blighting and obscuring a fundamental, valid, and vital idea — depriving the human race of decent electronic documents for twenty years.
Conclusion
I'd rather hope to finish this in a dignified manner, without the harsh language that my heart is bursting to employ. If I were to call Gary Wolf a swine, it would be an uncalled-for and gratuitous insult to all pigs, many of whom are decent and well-intentioned — unlike Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Gary [expletive deleted] Wolf, whom I believe all persons of decency should henceforth forever refer to as Gory Jackal.
Thank you.