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Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also invented the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics. The main thrust of his work has been to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people. His motto is:

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

Career

Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. The effort is documented in his 1974 books Computer Lib and Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. Much of his adult life has been devoted to working on Xanadu and advocating it.

The Xanadu project itself failed to flourish, for a variety of reasons which are disputed. Journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history of Nelson and Xanadu in the June, 1995 issue of Wired magazine. Nelson expressed his disgust on his Web site and threatened to sue "Gory Jackal." *

Some aspects of its vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web. The Web owes much of its inspiration to Xanadu, but Nelson dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup, and regards Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his own work:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. – Ted Nelson (Ted Nelson one-liners )

Nelson is working on a new information structure, ZigZag (software), which is described on the Xanadu project website, which also hosts two versions of the Xanadu code.

He is currently a philosopher and visiting professor at Oxford University working in the fields of information, computers, and human-machine interfaces.

Education and awards

Nelson earned a Bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959, a Master's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1963 and a Doctorate in Media and Governance from Keio University in 2002.

In 1998, at the Seventh WWW Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Ted was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award. He told the audience that it was the first award that he had ever received for his 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 late Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and the Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm. His ethnicity is primarily Norwegian-American.

Bibliography

  • Life, Love, College, etc. (1959)
  • Computer Lib: You can and must understand computers now/Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report (1974), Microsoft Press, rev. edition 1987: ISBN 0914845497
  • The Home Computer Revolution (1977)
  • Literary Machines: The report on, and of, Project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow's intellectual... including knowledge, education and freedom (1981), Mindful Press, Sausalito, California, 1981 edition: ISBN 089347052X, 1988 edition: ISBN 0893470554
  • The Future of Information (1997)

External links

Living people | Computer pioneers | Human-computer interaction notables | Norwegian-Americans | Swarthmore College alumni | Internet history

Theodor Holm Nelson | Ted Nelson | テッド・ネルソン | Ted Nelson | Theodor Nelson

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Ted Nelson".

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