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date: 2021-04-18
status: 🌱
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![Mockup of the Xanadu project in 1972](assets/images/xanadu2.jpeg)

> Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the [[World Wide Web]], with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original [[hypertext]] model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu>

![Boxes and lines drawing of Xanadu's concept](assets/images/xanadu.png)

## THE XANADU® PARALLEL UNIVERSE
### Visibly Connected Pages and Documents for a New Kind of Writing

> Conventional electronic documents were designed in the 1970s by well-funded conventional thinkers at Xerox PARC, who asked, "How can we imitate paper?" The result is today's electronic document-- Microsoft Word format and the printout format PDF.  They imitate paper and emphasize appearance and fonts.
>
> But much earlier, in 1960, the Xanadu project started with a completely different idea: since interactive screens are coming (who else knew?), we asked a different question: How can we IMPROVE on paper?
>
> We foresaw a new screen literature of parallel, interconnected documents.

<https://xanadu.com/xUniverse-D6>