Entrepreneurs in the tech industry call themselves contrarians, but Ted Nelson is the real thing. He's a pioneer of the software industry, but his ideas have never been mainstream. His love of language, film, and technology makes him a prime candidate for using computers to bring about a media revolution. But his full vision of the connecting and sourcing the world's information is known by very few... and understood by even fewer. Project Xanadu is Nelson's dream of the future ― a way to truly augment human intellect. It was suppose to be completed in 1970. Decades later, he's still fighting for his vision.

"everything is deeply intertwingled" It's a mantra often repeated by computer visionary Ted Nelson¹. In every interview, talk, and rant those same words are repeated. It's the same phrase that's plastered on the front of his 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines.

Nelson's town north of San fransisco

It only took a few minutes after I stepped onto his swaying house boat before he uttered those words. The boat is docked on the Sausalito shore, just north of San Francisco proper. It sits there with a dozen other boats ― not used for fishing or exploring ― but as a permanent residence. The house is small and somewhat cluttered, and there are no clear divides between rooms. There are only a few steps between the living room and the kitchen. The bed is tucked away behind the curtain. An old Mac computer ― the only computer in this visionary's home ― is tucked away behind the couch. The logical divisions and compartmentalization of his home ― and his mind ― are missing. everything is deeply intertwingled.

As we sit down for lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant, I asked if it's okay with him if I record the conversation. "Of course," he replies "I have been recording this the entire time" as he pulls out his audio recorder to show me. While I use an app on my iPhone, he uses a small black recorder². "That reminds me, in the state of California it's the law to inform you that I am recording this." Along with his recorder, he carries a small notebook and a variety of pens to record his thoughts. He doesn't take digital notes, because "no software ― yet ― has a good system for organizing information."

Definition and Origin of "intertwingled"

A friend of his, Lauren, joins us for lunch. It's been 6 months since Nelson's wife passed away, and Lauren has been staying with him to help him with the various activities that his wife did while he was working ― from finances to cooking and cleaning. Nelson prefers immense focus on his work and doesn't want to have to think about the more common aspects of life.

During the meal, the conversation ranges from which states require informed consent for recording conversations, to his computer club in the '70s called "The Resistors"³, to what has taken Xanadu so long. Many times, midway through and explanation, he pauses. "Excuse me for a moment" ― he pulls out his nearly full notebook and jots down a thought. Occasionally he picks up right where he left off, occasionally he starts on an entirely new topic, never does he explain what he wrote down.

The first stanza of "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The notebook he uses looks familiar ― there are dozens of them stacked back on the houseboat. He always writes down notes, saving every thought for the day when they can be digitalized into Xanadu, the ultimate organizational structure of all for humanity.

School divides human knowledge into classes, into subjects, into categories. But the world doesn't divide itself. Nature, biology, chemistry, physics, art. They are not separate and distinct things. everything is deeply intertwingled.

Nelson talking on the deck outside of his boathouse

For hundreds of years, paper was the medium for recording thoughts and knowledge. Paper is static. Once something is written down, it can't be changed. Paper is also flat; it has only two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. But computer screens are different. Nelson saw this before anyone else, in 1974. Computer screens can change, and they are not limited by physics. With an interactive screen, you can simulate n-dimensions.⁴

In 1974, Nelson realized that people might just try to use computer screens to simulate paper.⁵ They might write linear stories, and record things charts, and display static graphics. He saw the trend, and his worst nightmare came true.

"No one's life has yet been simplified by a computer," Ted Nelson said in 1974. And it's still true to this day. People use computers to simulate paper. Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and the World Wide Web are all crimes to Nelson.

A prototype of "Xanadu Space", a 3D but feature-incomplete version of his vision.

Microsoft Word ― and all word processors ― simulate one piece of paper at a time. But all content is connected and referenced to other content. Word doesn't show the connections between content. What if you use a quote from Declaration of Independence in another document? There's no way to reference the reader to the original body of work.

You might be able to get close by putting a link in an HTML document, but there are two problems. First, you lose your place in the first piece of content. Second, and more importantly, if you happened on the original body of work, you can't find all the places that it's referenced: links only work one direction.

Nelson's diagram of the "XDM".

This is the dream of Xanadu: a system for linking all human knowledge. It's similar to the World Wide Web, expect that the WWW is "a cheap knockoff attempting to steal my idea." Xanadu is what the web should have been ― and it was thought of decades before Tim Burners Lee created the web. ⁶

The key feature of Xanadu: "Parallel documents, visibly connected." parallel documents, visibly connected. It's Nelson's second favorite mantra, and it's the tagline of Xanadu.

Xanadu was Nelson's PhD thesis in the '60s. Half a decade later, Xanadu is more than Nelson's life work. It's Nelson's life. He has "come close about three different times" to completing the project, but has never gotten a version up to his standards.

One obvious problem, he doesn't know how to code. He calls himself a "producer/director of software" ― just like Steve Jobs. The difference? "Jobs was much better at managing people. I've struggled with that throughout my time."

He gets carried away quickly, but there's an almost unimaginable determination for everything he does. A few years ago, he asked someone to explain Bitcoin. They gave a high level overview, but it wasn't enough. Nelson wanted details. He soon discovered that he couldn't find anyone that could explain how Bitcoin actually worked, so he took a year off from working on Xanadu to figure it out for himself. The outcome? "Well, nothing really came of it. I understand Bitcoin now, but I think it was a waste of time."

Xanadu has had many problems throughout it's development. From different groups of programmers joining and leaving the team, to companies funding and then defunding the project. The biggest setback was a feature written for Wired called "The Curse of Xanadu". The 20 page feature described Xanadu as the "biggest vaporware project in the history of computing" and describes a scene where the author was nearly killed in the car. It described Nelson has out of touch and fanatical. Nelson says it was the biggest backstabbing of his life, and he "lost 20 years of progress because of it."

Nelson writing down his next plans.

Ted Nelson is an eccentric character. He smoked a cigarette while we sat on the front porch saying he "only smokes once or two a year. My rule is every time I smoke a cigarette, I eat one. And the taste is so terrible, I won't want another for months at a time." He also loves language, and loves to play with language. It should be malleable, he says. He's coined well known terms in technology such as: hypertext, hyperlink, hyperspace. ⁷ He's also invented other, less well known words such "dildonics" (internet connected sex toys), transclusion (the inclusion of the content of a document into another document by reference), and virtuality (the seeming of anything, as opposed to its reality).

Ted Nelson is the dark horse of the computer field. He has been misunderstood for decades, and people struggle to wrap their heads around Nelson's complex ideas (such as Zig-Zag Structures, which is similar to Excel, but instead of having and X columns and Y rows, it has N-dimensions. The user has to rotate the perspective of the data because ― of course ― you can't visual more than 3 of the dimensions at a time).

Nelson's diagram of a Zig-Zag Structure

Besides implementing his ideas, one of the biggest challenges he's had is developing examples of why 2 dimensions is not enough. For Zig Zag Structures, his best example is a file of data about the royal family of England, and their associated meta-data: it has their date of birth, who their parents are and who their children are, and more. In one perspective, you can see the family tree, because the parent/children connections are displayed. In another view, the data visualization shows date of birth on one axis, and time on another: which transforms the structure into a timeline. Without more examples, people seem perfectly content using Excel in just two dimensions, just like they would graph out on a piece of paper.

Nelson's 4 Fundamental Truths

Misunderstood, disrespected, and ignored for generations, Nelson has understandably struggled. His ideas are rarely taught, since the commercially successful are remembered (Jobs, Gates) but the original thinkers and designers (Nelson, Kay, Engelbart) are usually not. But Nelson hasn't given up. He is currently working on a "partial implementation" of Xanadu that's tailored to lawyers and the judicial system. parallel documents, visibly connected.

Through all of the hardship and burden of an unfulfilled vision, he stays surprisingly hopeful. "We expect vindication, the last laugh, and a redefinition of electronic literature ― and at the least, that our format will join the others as a standard that does not imitate paper."

He's always thought that it's the design, not the technical details that matter. That technology is more about politics and design that engineering. "The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms."

So he'll keep working, and he'll keep preaching his vision. And he'll do what he has said for decades:

"With ideas which are still radical,
we fight on."