The Xanadu plan proposes a single unified world of data to which everyone will have point-and-click access from whatever computer, videogame or multimedia player they want to use … Once your materials are on the network, anyone with a modem can buy a copy and make connections to it that make it even more interesting or useful for others. Each time material from your document is bought by anybody, you can get a royalty on that fragment.
Predictor: Nelson, Ted
Prediction, in context:On the Xanadu Web site, Ted Nelson’s vision for the future of communications is shared. It says: ”There are many views of just what tomorrow’s electronic media will be, and how they will reach the consumer. The Xanadu plan proposes a single unified world of data to which everyone will have point-and-click access from whatever computer, videogame or multimedia player they want to use. Think of it as a real data bank. Just as you put your money in a bank for safekeeping, you can put your data on the Xanadu network for safekeeping. And in the same way that your money can earn interest in a bank, your data can make money too. If anybody wants pieces of it, they buy it from the network and you get paid. You get paid even if other people use parts of it in their work. On the Xanadu network, any object may quote from any other, since the material quoted is bought from the original publisher at the time of delivery. We’ve succeeded in cleaning up the copyright problem for computer networks. Besides what individuals and publishers put in, new forms of interconnection and quotation are possible, creating a new world of metamedia objects … Xanadu structure is built for open hypermedia publishing, allowing free interconnection among documents. Every author of a new document is free to connect to previous documents, including quotation, without pre-arrangement or advance payment … Once your materials are on the network, anyone with a modem can buy a copy and make connections to it that make it even more interesting or useful for others. Each time material from your document is bought by anybody, you can get a royalty on that fragment.”
Biography:Ted Nelson came up with the idea in 1967 to develop Xanadu, a world-wide electronic publishing system that could serve as a sort of universal library, accessible to everyone. (Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is a similar-but-smaller-scale system.) Because he was seen as a radical and he wasn’t a trained technology professional, Nelson’s ideas were sometimes ignored. Computer hackers continued working on building the code for Xanadu over the decades. In 1999, the Xanadu code was made open-source. Nelson was known for coining the term “hypertext.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: March 23, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: Xanadu Web site
Title, headline, chapter name: Xanadu: The Information Future
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Http://www.aus.xanadu.com/xanadu/future.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Ries, Kristin N.