[Home](https://tednelsonfan.com/) / [Ideas](https://tednelsonfan.com/ideas/) / The docuverse and tumblers: one library, every version # The docuverse and tumblers: one library, every version The universe of documents, and an address for every character in it. Ted Nelson at the Internet Archive, San Francisco, 8 October 2010, the night he launched Possiplex. Photo: Beatrice Murch (CC BY 2.0), Wikimedia Commons. Docuverse is another of his words, listed on his own page among the terms he coined. It names the whole of connected literature as one space: every document, every version, every quotation, addressable and linked. Literary Machines describes it as the place where a new form of literature can grow without the limits of a linear medium like the printed book. The technical idea that makes a docuverse possible is the tumbler, devised by Mark S. Miller and Roger Gregory in the summer of 1979 at Swarthmore. A tumbler is an address built from transfinite numbers: it identifies the machine, the author, the document, the version and the exact span of bytes, and it can name a range of content or a set of links. Because the address is stable, a link made today still finds its target in the version it pointed at, and a later version can be compared with it side by side. This is what Nelson means by version management and why he calls its absence on the Web a defect rather than a simplification. A web address names a location, not a text; the text at that location can change silently, and the link cannot tell. In the docuverse the link names the text. XanaduSpace (2007) is the visible form of the idea: documents laid out as parallel pages in three dimensions with their connections drawn as beams between them. He demonstrates it in several of the videos on this site. Sources: [Wikipedia, Literary Machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Machines); [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu); [his own Who I Am page](https://ted.hyperland.com/whoIam/). Where this page paraphrases him, the paraphrase is ours and the source is his. ## More ideas - ### Hypertext: writing that branches The word is his, from 1963. So is the idea that a text need not be a line. - ### Project Xanadu: the original hypertext project Founded 1960. Still not finished, and still the most complete alternative to the Web anyone has designed. - ### Transclusion: the same content, knowably, in more than one place Not a copy. A window onto the original, with the origin still attached. - ### Intertwingularity: there are no subjects A 1974 portmanteau for the fact that knowledge does not come in boxes. - ### ZigZag: a spreadsheet with as many dimensions as you need Conceived at Datapoint in 1981; patented in 2001; built by a small team ever since. --- An independent fan and tribute site celebrating the work of Ted Nelson. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or the official site of Ted Nelson or Project Xanadu. His real sites are xanadu.com and hyperland.com.