English

The First Xanadu Proposal, 1966

The First Xanadu Proposal, 1966 This is historically interesting on a number of levels-- about hypertext, word processing, Xanadu, and personal computing-- twenty years before the personal computer. The paper was a proposal to Bill Jovanovich, my boss-- he and I had gone together to see Engelbart. Engelbart was wonderful, and I was converted to the mouse, but the other ideas here were my own. And this may be the first description ever of an easy-to-use word processor, though that term did not exist. What I really wanted was a lab to develop hypertext and graphics, and I believed it could all be done on the Digital Equipment 338. While the thinking is clear and the proposal is straightforward, I vastly underestimated the scope of the project. Naturally it was doomed-- Harcourt was an IBM shop and in corporate politics your enemy is the other department-- no way would the department (or the IBM sales team) allow a rival's equipment into the corporation.

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