Project Xanadu – The Internet That Might Have Been
4th June 2026
The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk.
Full disclosure: Mark Miller was a friend of mine at Yale, and you could not get him to shut up about Xanadu.