AT THE XANADU STAND

Some sketches and words about an alternative online world.

One of my favorite future visions in Ted Nelson's DREAM MACHINES (1974) is his proposal for how Xanadu – the global hypermedia system – would operate as a network of franchises called Xanadu Stands.

Rather than trying to amass enormous amounts of capital to build a centralized information system (a la Compuserve, which began in 1969) as well as a number of installations running the high-end display hardware that the Xanadu applications would require, Nelson proposed that the system should grow piecemeal through a network of franchise operations.

Each Xanadu stand would supply at least one minicomputer, ample storage (megabytes and megabytes!), and multiple graphics terminals for its on-site users, as well as dial-up access services for those fortunate enough to have the front-end hardware at home. All of the Xanadu stands would contribute computing resources and content to the ever-growing distributed network.

Xanadu stands would be recognizable by their modular hexaform architecture and "adorable purple enamel" exteriors, as well as the flaming-X brand logo (actually, this is anachronistic – DREAM MACHINES says golden X's – the flaming purple X came later). Ted's vision of hypermedia was not solely text-oriented, and he knew that games, music, movies, and more would soon be on computer networks, so he wanted the Xanadu stands to be something like an Internet cafe (the first one of these wouldn't open until 1994), video arcade, and movie theater all rolled into one – with capability varied by installation size, of course.

It's interesting how this small-business-oriented model of network growth is, to a certain extent, how the Web caught fire in the '90s. It wasn't all America Online and similar mega-ISPs at the onset; my first ISP, and that of millions of other Americans, was a small local business, and the first Web pages we made were usually published on our mom-and-pop ISP's servers, as Web page hosting was a somewhat common feature in those early days. The difference, of course, is that these ISPs were entirely independent – not franchise operations of a World Wide Web Corporation – and they were certainly not brightly-colored, exciting places to hang out, consume, and create in. Like the majority of commercial computing in the '90s, they were a fairly beige affair; bland offices that you'd only visit if you needed to pay your bill in-person.

It's interesting to wonder how things might be different today had the age of global, interactive, networked media been ushered in with flashy corporate styling and design, with an online culture informed by an outside-the-home, physical, social setting, rather than all of us peering in anonymity and solitude into our home computer screens. I love the anarchic madness of our de facto Web, owned by no one (...yet, despite the machinations of Faceboogles), but there is an undeniable romance for me in the postwar utopian vision of Xanadu Ted lays out in DREAM MACHINES. It's fun, it's hip, it's McDonald's for the mind, but it's more than that, too – it's fundamentally optimistic. There CAN be benevolent corporations serving a curious and creative public that is thirsty for knowledge, experience, and expression ...right? It's very hard to look at today's Web and not see those notions as naive or downright absurd, but reading Ted's words, his excitement and enthusiasm about how the world of the mind will be unfolded before our eyes on computer screens – it continues to inspire me, and I would love to be able to step into an alternate universe in which Ted's vision had been made real - and see how it played out.

—L. LBB

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