Posts from March, 2019
March 9, 2019
A Lost Treasure of Xanadu
Some years ago I found the cover sheet to a lost Xanadu architecture document, which I turned into this blog post for your amusement. Several people commented to me at the time that they wished they could see the whole document it was attached to. Alas, it appeared to have vanished forever.
Last weekend I found it! I turned up a copy of the complete document while sorting through old crap in preparation for having to move in the next few months. Now that I’ve found it I’m putting it online so it can get hoovered up by the internet hive mind. This is the paradox of the internet — nothing is permanent and nothing ever goes away.
This is a document I wrote in early 1984 at the behest of the System Development Foundation as part of Xanadu’s quest for funding. It is a detailed explanation of the Xanadu architecture, its core data structures, and the theory that underlies those data structures, along with a (really quite laughable) project plan for completing the system.
At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!
What I found was a bound printout, which I’ve scanned and OCR’d. The quality of the OCR is not 100% wonderful, but as far as I know no vestige of the original electronic form remains, so this is what we’ve got. I’ve applied minimal editing, aside from removing a section containing personal information about several of the people in the project, in the interest of those folks’ privacy.
Anyone so inclined is quite welcome, indeed encouraged, to attempt a better conversion to a more suitable format. I’d do that myself but I really don’t have the time at the moment.
This should be of interest to anyone who is curious about the history of Project Xanadu or its technical particulars. I’m not sure where the data structures rank given the subsequent 35 or so years of advance in computer science, but I think it’s still possible there’s some genuinely groundbreaking stuff in there.