alt Hacker NewsIt's not a reality for a lack of trying. Multiple people have spent (literal!) lifetimes working on Xanadu and multiple businesses poured a great deal of money and effort into it way back in the day.
It continues to not be a thing because, even though the idea is superficially appealing to a certain engineer mind and that's why people get sucked into the cult, in reality it's not something anybody wants and it's solving a problem nobody has.
Right. I knew those people back when Autodesk owned Xanadu. The fundamental problem was that tracking and paying for text ownership and viewing down to the word level isn't really very useful. The Xanadu people were libertarians into micropayments. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Not cheap views, expensive ones, like Lexis/Nexis.
Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.