This seems to assume knowledge of many things to be accessible. 800 words in, and many “characters” are introduced by name only. I have zero clue what Xanadu, Project Xanadu, ZigZag, OSMIC, xu92 or 88, or POOMfilade, or Udanax Gold or Green is. This might be a failure on my part, I scrolled a bit further in the article, grasping at a known technological term, and I saw IPFS and DHT! That got me briefly excited about the article, but at that point my interest was already lost. I’m sorry! Maybe the article would gain from a brief introduction to what Xanadu is/was?
I was assuming the audience was vaguely aware of Xanadu, although I did briefly touch on its historical importance at the beginning of the introduction. Most of the terms I dropped in the introduction have their own section later on. (The whole reason I’m writing this is that publically accessible documentation on OSMIC and ZigZag are nearly non-existent and documentation on xu88 is hard to find.)
The TL;DR version, however, is: Xanadu is the project that originated most of the ideas that are now called ‘hypertext’, and hypertext systems like the World Wide Web are based on descriptions of Xanadu prototypes made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Work continues on Xanadu to the current day, but releases are pretty rare, so the concepts haven’t been integrated into the rest of the community.
For a less technical introduction to Xanadu, I recommend Ted’s video series Xanadu Basics:
This seems to assume knowledge of many things to be accessible. 800 words in, and many “characters” are introduced by name only. I have zero clue what Xanadu, Project Xanadu, ZigZag, OSMIC, xu92 or 88, or POOMfilade, or Udanax Gold or Green is. This might be a failure on my part, I scrolled a bit further in the article, grasping at a known technological term, and I saw IPFS and DHT! That got me briefly excited about the article, but at that point my interest was already lost. I’m sorry! Maybe the article would gain from a brief introduction to what Xanadu is/was?
I was assuming the audience was vaguely aware of Xanadu, although I did briefly touch on its historical importance at the beginning of the introduction. Most of the terms I dropped in the introduction have their own section later on. (The whole reason I’m writing this is that publically accessible documentation on OSMIC and ZigZag are nearly non-existent and documentation on xu88 is hard to find.)
The TL;DR version, however, is: Xanadu is the project that originated most of the ideas that are now called ‘hypertext’, and hypertext systems like the World Wide Web are based on descriptions of Xanadu prototypes made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Work continues on Xanadu to the current day, but releases are pretty rare, so the concepts haven’t been integrated into the rest of the community.
For a less technical introduction to Xanadu, I recommend Ted’s video series Xanadu Basics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKbRcvIZT8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_o8q4Sp-w0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xYwgJW7T8o