Ted Nelson (original) (raw)

Theodor Holm Nelson (born 1937).

Ted Nelson invented the term 'hypertext' in 1965, and is a pioneer of information technology. He also coined the words transclusion and intertwingularity.

Ted Nelson is admired as a modern philosopher who worked in the fields of information, computers, and human-machine interfaces. He founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating such a system on a computer network, further documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines.

The Xanadu project itself failed to take off, but its vision is in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web that owes much of its inspiration to Xanadu.

Nelson hates the World Wide Web, the Internet, XML and all embedded markup, and regards Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his own work.

He is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag, information about which can be found off the Xanadu project home page, which also contains two versions of the Xanadu code.

He is the son of the Academy Award-winning actress, Celeste Holm.

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