Sunday, June 08, 2014

The king of vaporware, and publishing a book

Two great reads, both via longform. The first is an entertaining tale about Xanadu, a piece of software (really a large network) dreamed up by the man who coined the term "hypertext". The story is from 1995, Wired mag. The second is about publishing a fiction novel -- the ins, the outs, the whathaveyous. The story of getting a book published is sometimes as good as the story in the book. Book article is at Vanity Fair.

More on Xanadu: the project began in 1960, and it was released a few weeks ago (that's April 2014). Here's a Guardian story on the release. Amazing -- 54 years and it's finally ready! Ted Nelson is the guy who dreamed it up, and coined hypertext. The 1995 Wired article came out when the WWW was taking off, and my first impression was that the WWW was Xanadu, and it certainly is similar. When Nelson was asked about the web, his reply was, "Nice try."

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