Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.) In December 2024 during a visit to San Francisco, I was lucky enough to be invited at the last minute to a party that could only have happened there: a celebration of the 50 th anniversary of hypermedia visionary Ted Nelson’s 1974 52ya manifesto, Computer Lib/Dream Machines "> Computer Lib/Dream Machines , extolling the vision of Project Xanadu hypertext . I’ve contributed to English Wikipedia for 20 years now, and I’ve been working on Gwern.net on and off for 15 years now, so I could not possibly miss an entire party of people with strong opinions on hypertext.…