Xanadu & Udanax History


See also Press Coverage of Xanadu.

History of the Xanadu® Projects

***to be written

Nelson's 1982 Datamation article A New Home for the Mind.

Who?

Many people made many contributions over the years. Here we attempt to give credit for the major conceptual or technical contributions to Udanax Green & Gold, but the long years make memory unreliable. If you know of a contribution you feel we should have included, please let us know. We probably just forgot, and you have our apologies. (We also intend to acknowledge other forms of contribution eventually.)

Udanax Green, in approximate chronological order:

The Hypertext Concept

Vannevar Bush -- 1945

The Xanadu Hypertext Concepts

Ted Nelson -- 1963 on.

Also of influence was Doug Engelbart's Augment System -- 1963 on.

The Model-T Enfilade

Ted Nelson, John Ridgeway, Cal Daniels -- 1972

Transclusion by Subtree Sharing & I vs. V

Bill Barus -- 1977 (Is this right?)

General Enfilade Theory & many new enfilades

Mark S. Miller, Stuart Grace (then Stuart Greene) -- 1979

Tumbler Addressing and Arithmetic, Udanax Green Architecture

Roger Gregory, Mark S. Miller -- 1980

Construction of Udanax Green

Roger Gregory, Mark S. Miller, Eric Hill, Roland King -- 1980 - 1988

Early Udanax Green Frontends

Roger Gregory, John Walker -- 1988.

The Pyxi Frontend

Ka Ping Yee -- 1999

Udanax Gold, in approximate chronological order:

The Ent

K. Eric Drexler -- 1983

Overall Udanax Gold Architecture

Mark S. Miller, E. Dean Tribble, Ravi Pandya -- 1988 - 1992

Major architectural contributions by Michael McClary & K. Eric Drexler -- 1988 - 1992

Coordinate Space System & The Reformulation of General Enfilade Theory

Ravi Pandya, E. Dean Tribble, Mark S. Miller

Canopies

E. Dean Tribble, Mark S. Miller, Ravi Pandya, Michael McClary

Detectors

Marc Stiegler, Ravi Pandya, E. Dean Tribble, Mark S. Miller

Smalltalk to C++ Translator

E. Dean Tribble, Roland King -- 1989 -- 1992

Incremental Generational Garbage Collector

Eric Hill, E. Dean Tribble, Roger Gregory, Keith Henson -- 1988 - 1994

Persistent Object System

E. Dean Tribble, Michael McClary

Remote Messaging with Message Pipelining

Mark S. Miller, E. Dean Tribble, Ravi Pandya

Early Udanax Gold Frontends

Marc Stiegler, Hugh Hoover, Roger Gregory

Rob Jellinghaus, E. Dean Tribble, Eric Hill

Systems Inspired by Xanadu®

The Web

The most important of the systems inspired (or partially inspired) by Xanadu® is, obviously, the World Wide Web -- the medium on which you are presently reading these very pages. The 1989 document Information Management: A Proposal is one of Tim Berners Lee's earliest records of the birth of the web.