That is somewhat ironic. But I guess we all view the vast array of life through the narrow slit of whatever tank we may be driving at the time... Not too surprising that we miss significant things.
I was never involved in the Xanadu project, but I admired the vision - a sort of "self-authenticating" web that would interlink all sources back to their origins, and also automatically provide access to commentaries on everything.
I had some ideas for eliminating newspapers... I was contemplating broadcasting news over FM radio sideband channels, using forward error correction to ensure delivery. I was going to build dirt-cheap decoders that used zero-crossing detection a-la Apple ][ audio input ports. You would essentially just need a radio subcarrier (think "Muzak") audio channel fed through a cable into your detector...
Big ideas, zero capital. Go figure! ;)
We could probably write some great "alt history" stories about your MIME encoding and my data distribution schemes... ;)
Yep. I had ulterior motives. People were playing MUDs and we were limited by bandwidth so my motive was gaming. I was coming up with ways to add controls, images, animations, sound, etc and be able to do it over a low bandwidth connection. :)
Mine definitely was not human readable though. You'd use my tools to produce the Base 64 feed that could generate whatever was needed.
It mostly was theoretical. My first son was born and that changed my world and I didn't do much for two years. It was in those two years that the WWW explosion happened.
Very interesting. Thanks for the backstory! ;)