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From: doug@eris (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Amiga Xanadu (was Re: Time is of the essence on IPC.)
Message-ID: <8531@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 9 Apr 88 19:54:33 GMT
References: <1571@louie.udel.EDU> <353@brambo.UUCP> <1661@louie.udel.EDU> <627@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <908@nuchat.UUCP>
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Reply-To: doug@eris.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <908@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>Hey! What happened to Amiga Xanadu? Anything new on that front lately?

For one thing, don't hold your breath for anything out of the Xanadu
project...they are chronically understaffed and underfunded. I
have the impression that they're in an infinite design loop, too,
since it's been several years now that they've had alpha stuff running
on a Sun, but it never gets released. One further gets the impression
that they are so visionary that they will have troubles with real
world marketing, despite their "Speaker-to-Bankers" associate
(my all-time favorite business card job title, btw). Roger Gregory was
their only "full-time" person for a long time; I don't know about right
this instant.

For another thing, last time I checked they were not especially hot
on the Amiga...they had one lying around that someone would periodically
do a little Xanadu front end work for, while it gathered dust the
rest of the time. Their interest is in the Sun as a back end server,
and primarily on the Mac and Atari ST as front ends.

(BTW they're in Palo Alto, California, and interested parties should
see the (latest) edition of "Literary Machines" for definition of
data structures and overall design. Also note that "Computer Lib"
has a new edition out with a great many updates.)

This might have changed recently if some Amiga hacker has gotten
more free time to work on it, but see paragraph 1 above. Ted Nelson
*has* seen the NewTek demo on their in-house Amiga and apparently was
impressed. Furthermore Nelson has recently moved from Texas to Palo
Alto, apparently to support the efforts more directly. (I don't know
if this is good or bad; we'll see.) Anyone in the Palo Alto area
with some serious interest & free time should contact them; they'd
probably welcome some help.

One more thing...they have been distributing their documentation via
Owl's "Guide" hypertext program for the Mac, which they apparently
approve of.  I don't know what they think about Hypercard.

They appear to be one of the only groups working on a sort of universal
global hypertext data base, in a visionary futuristic sense; most of
the other folks in the world are doing localized hypertext data bases
(stuff stored just on your local machine or distributed across a LAN,
as opposed to "having the world's knowledge at your fingertips").

	Doug Merritt		doug@mica.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!mica!doug)
			or	ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug