Get the latest tech news

Review: Project Xanadu – The Internet That Might Have Been

Finalist #12 in the Review Contest

Ultimately the Web really is “just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” We’re reading and writing, publishing new kinds of media, calling up documents like crazy, democratizing publication to a fault, and… ah. For instance, in the space of just two pages, he writes about how incredibly virtuous he is for not selling out to Bill Gates, that “friends often tell [him], ‘Oh, you should get a MacArthur Genius Grant!’,” and that Robin Williams once “squatted down beside” him and said: “I think it’s wonderful what you’ve done for the world.” I think we can, in large part, trace it back to Doug Engelbart, who, by blind, dumb luck, found himself on a remote Philippine island for two years with nothing to do but hang out in a big hut full of magazines.

Get the Android app