Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight

A December 2024 San Francisco gathering marked the 50th anniversary of Ted Nelson’s hypermedia manifesto, featuring Nelson memorabilia and vintage Xanadu implementations run by a former Autodesk-era programmer. He recounted that Xanadu was prototyped in Smalltalk, then cross-compiled to C++, requiring a week-long compile on 1990s hardware, and that limited storage (≈50 MB drives) constrained the system’s capabilities, contrasting sharply with today’s multi-gigabyte web sites.