Ted Nelson

Theodor Holm Nelson, known as Ted Nelson, is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher of computer science and sociologist, born on June 17, 1937. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965, and in 1965 he presented the paper in which he introduced hypertext at the ACM National Conference. Nelson earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959, a master's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1962, and a doctorate in media and governance from Keio University in 2002. Much of his adult life has gone to Project Xanadu, a proposed computer-based writing system with two-way links meant to preserve context, documented in Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines. Its outcome is disputed: Wired magazine called it the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing in 1995, while Nelson has said that parts of his vision were fulfilled by the World Wide Web, though he objects to its one-way links.