Ted Nelson
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Theodor Holm Nelson (born 1937). invented the term "hypertext" in 1965, and is a pioneer of information technology. He also coined the words transclusion and intertwingularity.
Ted Nelson, currently a visiting professor at Oxford University, 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 aspects of its vision are 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 dislikes 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.
In 2001 he was knighted by France as "Officier des Arts et Lettres". In 2004 he was appointed as a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and associated with the Oxford Internet Institute - where he is currently conducting his research.
He is the son of the Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm, and Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson.
He earned a Bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959, and a Master's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1963.
Bibliography
- Life, Love, College, etc. (1959)
- Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974)
- The Home Computer Revolution (1977)
- Literary Machines (1981, 1993)
- The Future of Information (1997)
External links