Udanax ? (was Persist or not persist : comment)

[btanksley@hifn.com]

> From: shapj@us.ibm.com [mailto:shapj@us.ibm.com]
> Subject: RE: Udanax ? (was Persist or not persist : comment)

> > Remember Xanadu, the huge hypertext system Ted Nelson 
> > imagined but never
> > managed to finish?  Udanax = reverse(Xanadu).

> As a former Xanadu CEO (I managed the Autodesk spinout), I 
> feel this is a
> distraction.  At the time I took over, Xanadu suffered from 
> three problems:

> The Xanadudes were quite brilliant architects. Problem (4), 
> however, is serious,
> and I think that any system built from either of the original 
> Xanadu code bases
> will fail. I am hopeful that udanax will eventually succeed, 
> but I don't think
> that they will do so from the current code base.

Doctor Shapiro,

Thanks for the warning.  I suspected this, both from the length of
development and from the fact that they released two packages rather than
just the final one.

Udanax is not, of course, useless; however, so far I've been intending to
use it as a model and source of algorithms rather than as a source for code.
It's a pity they didn't opensource more documentation with it -- open source
code is almost useless when it's so unusable.

Of course, Tunes (as you know) is only a bit younger than Xanadu, and
therefore has just as strong a record of unsuccess.  Oh well.  I think the
best thing for me to do is to continue trying to understand Xanadu, and
stand out of the way while other people try to implement Tunes.

Thanks for taking the time to post.  Are you subscribed to this list, or did
you just drop in?

> Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph. D.

-Billy