I also spoke of "success" in rather round terms. Nobody really knows how
good a job Google (for instance) really does; the joke at Google, I am
told, is that Google indexes 1,326,920,000 pages, or zero percent, of
the Web (:)). It seems to be good enough, and it's far from useless.
I don't think there were any "experts in this field" in 1990. There were
a bunch of people doing their best with what they had to hand. You are
free to disagree. I was at the HyperTEXT '87 conference in
Raleigh-Durham, and there were a whole lot of knowledgeable people
betting on what a pragmatist like Emlyn in 2000 would probably call the
wrong horses.
It turns out that, among its other failings, Xanadu was ironically too
"central" a model to take off, plus, this was before the Open Source
approach was accepted; the sprawl and chaos of the Net was able to
muddle through to what we have now.
At least we don't have to explain why anyone would want hypertext any
more.
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> At 12:56pm -0800 12/8/00, Michael M. Butler wrote:
> >You appear to be arguing something different from me. I spoke
> >specifically of "the Xanies", those involved with Project Xanadu. I
> >don't see how you could factually disagree that the people working on
> >Xanadu through at least 1990, all of whom I know personally, would not
> >have had the reaction I suggest, more or less.
>
> You are correct. I cannot really argue for the specific expectations
> of specific people.
>
> >How familiar are you with those people and the Xanadu code? The Xanadu
> >architecture provided for "indexing" at the time of entry of data. It
> >provided for royalty at byte granularity. Linear time indexing after the
> >fact is *expensive*, and all of the Xanadu people I know would have
> >expected any such substantial effort to have been recouped somehow.
>
> Perhaps. But many free search engines were available by 1990. It
> seems unlikely that experts in this field would have failed to
> predict something that already existed. Your original claims was:
>
> > > >On the other side of the fence: none of the Xanies would have predicted
> > > >the widespread implementation and immense success and popularity of
> > > >*free* search engines. Free? Are you *nuts*? :)
> --
> Harvey Newstrom <HarveyNewstrom.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:34 MDT