Re: [xanadu] The sunless-sea.net meta-cyber-archaeology project, and Xanadu back-ends

[roger gregory <roger@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry for the delay, and I don't have much time now, but I thought I should send you something so you know I'm listening.
Ive been sitting on xanadu green (as described in Literary Machines), looking for a customer or a product.  I've put
too many years into it since 1976, but till I have some real target product or user (not Ted) I'm trying not to write more code.

The server needs a bit of work, to work with machines a million times larger than the 80 Meg disk Sun one that we built it on, currently
the disk bit map is limited to a few gig, and it would take a few days to fix that.  The bigger question on that is the rightish design, but the real thing is what it the product.  
Roger Gregory 415 572-9634 
On Aug 9, 2015, at 8:43 AM, Christopher White <cxwembedded@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> To all to whom these presents shall come, greetings!
> 
> My name is Chris White and I am new to the Xanadu list.  I have been
> interested in Xanadu since reading Ted's BYTE Magazine article
> "Managing Immense Storage" many years ago and have a well-thumbed copy
> of Literary Machines on my shelf.  I work as a patent agent so am
> painfully familiar with the need for versioning, transclusion, and
> bidirectional linking.  I also have nearly thirty years' programming
> experience, so am approaching 10,000 lines of MS Word VBA written to
> automate the tedious parts of my job.
> 
> I think a xanalogical document system would be valuable even if the
> user never saw it.  Hacking MS Word documents involves knowing the
> side effects of the function calls you make.  Changes one place in the
> document can silently break fields or text elsewhere in the document.
> And don't get me started on the difficulties of writing macros that
> work with all the permutations of whether or not changes are tracked
> or visible!
> 
> By contrast, a system carrying formatting in the links on the bytes
> would localize changes and greatly ease document automation.  Even for
> a single, static word-processor document with no links outside itself
> --- and even if the user never knew what was under the hood ---
> xanalogical storage and representation would save the world countless
> hours of MS Office add-in programmer heartache every year.
> 
> Has there been any discussion of using Xanadu as a storage engine in
> this or other ways?  Since I'm coming late to the party, I am hoping
> you smart folks know some pitfalls to avoid if I sit down to try
> something (in my copious spare time, of course :/ ).
> 
> To get started, I visited sunless-sea.net to refresh my memory of
> Xanadu internals.  I was dismayed to find that it was both down and
> missing from archive.org.  Thankfully, Berend van Berkum had saved a
> mirror of the plain text (many thanks, Berend!).  I have converted it
> to HTML it in a coarse way and am please to present, in hopes that it
> helps, an active mirror at https://cxw42.github.io/ .  Pull requests
> are welcome for additional content.  Somebody's (whose?) paper on the
> Ent is now back live with its full-color illustrations!
> 
> I look forward to discussion and to any thoughts anyone has on
> xanalogical storage engines or on the sunless-sea mirror.  Thank you
> in advance for welcoming me to the list!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Christopher White
>