5/183.2.3 Ted Nelson's Xanadu (1965)
About 20 years after Bush's famous article, the word ``hypertext'' was coined by Nelson in 1965. Ted Nelson's Xanadu was designed to be an online ``repository for everything that anybody has ever written'', a truly universal hypertext [Nie95]. Nelson has always relied upon science to, one day, develop storage devices capable of storing all published work on earth. Unfortunately, Xanadu has never been implemented. An interesting feature of Xanadu is that a document, once inserted into the system, would never be deleted. Even if a new version of a specific document was inserted, the old version would be kept because there could be links pointing to it. This feature of Xanadu could be used for version management (e.g. for software development).
The information would be stored either on local or on back end databases. If a requested document could not be found in the local database, it would be transparently retrieved from the back end repository via the network. In addition, documents can be virtually included in multiple contexts without being physically copied. The system would enable the authors to get royalties depending on the number of bytes seen by each reader, even if his document or parts of it are included in other documents.