There's a lot more to the real world than houses, turbine blades, and circuit boards. The real world is also a world of words and ideas, images and information. The dream of hypertext, and the ability to store, organise, retrieve, annotate, and present information in ways that do not mimic paper, but are fundamentally better, has inspired a generation of thinkers. We believe that Xanadu can benefit anyone who reads, writes, and thinks, and is applicable at scales ranging from an individual's personal computer to a global library storing all of human knowledge. We expect to ship the first commercial Xanadu system in less than 18 months.
Ideas are precious and rare.
They should be immortal. Most ideas are lost, most discoveries ignored, most interrelationships unremarked upon because we have no effective way to store and then find them. Galileo observed Neptune, but nobody noticed until the 1980's. Most ideas are committed to bits of paper, obscure professional journals, or computer media made obsolete by the next wave of innovation and are lost forever. Xanadu is intended to fix this, and we believe that in time it will become as universal a product for people who think as television is for people who don't.