After 30-years in development, the source code for Xanadu, an ambitious attempt to build a multi-dimensional hypertext system that in many ways parallels the Web, has been released by Internet visionary and enigma Ted Nelson.
Nelson, who coined the word "hypertext" in the early 1960s, announced the move at a sparsely attended session at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey, California, on Tuesday afternoon.
"Ted Nelson's writing and work was incredibly influential on a generation of designers and developers," said Dave Winer, an industry veteran who runs Scripting.com.
"He was a visionary. A lot of people looked up to him."
Named after the legendary kingdom of Kubla Khan from the poem by Samuel Coleridge, Xanadu was envisioned as a global, high-power hypertext publishing system, and was the inspiration for today's World Wide Web.
Nelson has described Xanadu as a democratic hypertext publishing system, based on a plan of sideways connections among documents and files.
Among other things, Xanadu allows anyone to create permanent two-way links between documents or portions of documents.
As well as providing a permanent, global repository for information, the system was also supposed to automatically take care of tricky issues like copyrights and micropayments.
Nelson began work on Xanadu in the early 1960s but while the project generated a lot of ink, it consistently failed to materialize.
Xanadu was described as the "longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry," in a Wired Magazine profile.
While Xanadu was languishing, a similar project headed up by Tim Berners-Lee evolved into the World Wide Web, a development that reportedly rankles Nelson.
Two snippets of the near-finished Xanadu code are available at the Udanax Web site.
Called Udanax Green and Gold -- to distinguish them from the ongoing Xanadu project -- the code has been released under the liberal X11 open source license.
Winer said it is unclear whether the raw code will prove useful but hoped it contained pointers for future development of the Web.
"It's the ideas," he said. "That's what counts."
Winer said the code is already generating threads on XML discussion groups. "There's a lot of interest."
