Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American leader in information technology, a thinker in computer science, and a researcher in sociology. He created the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and wrote about them in 1965. A 1997 article in Forbes said Nelson "describes himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software.'"

Early life and education

Nelson is the child of Ralph Nelson, an Emmy Award-winning director, and Celeste Holm, an Academy Award-winning actress. His parents were married for a short time, and he was mainly raised by his grandparents. He lived with them first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village.

Nelson received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959. After spending a year studying sociology at the University of Chicago, he began studying Social Relations, a department at Harvard University, where he focused on sociology. He earned a master's degree in sociology from the Department of Social Relations in 1962. After leaving Harvard, Nelson worked as a photographer and filmmaker for one year at John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute in Miami, Florida. During this time, he shared an office with Gregory Bateson. From 1964 to 1966, he taught sociology at Vassar College.

While in college and graduate school, Nelson imagined a computer-based writing system that could store the world's knowledge and make it easier to connect ideas. This idea became known as Project Xanadu.

Later in life, in 2002, Nelson received a PhD in media and governance from Keio University.

Project Xanadu

Nelson first thought of what would become Project Xanadu in the early 1960s. His goal was to create a computer network with a simple user interface. He began calling the project Xanadu in 1966. Books such as Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974), The Home Computer Revolution (1977), and Literary Machines (1981) describe his work on the project. Much of his adult life has been spent working on and promoting Xanadu.

Throughout his career, Nelson supported his work on Xanadu through many jobs, including positions at Harcourt Brace and Company, Brown University, Bell Labs, CBS Laboratories, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Swarthmore College. He also worked for the Nelson Organization (1968–1972) and Computopia Corporation (1977–1978). Clients of the Nelson Organization included IBM, Brown University, Western Electric, the University of California, the Jewish Museum, and other organizations. Nelson claimed the Nelson Organization was meant to secretly receive funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, but the money never arrived after certain goals were met.

From 1980 to 1981, he was the editor of Creative Computing. At the request of Xanadu developers Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene, Nelson joined Datapoint in San Antonio, Texas, as a chief software designer (1981–1982). He stayed with the company as a media specialist and technical writer until 1984. After working as a consultant in San Antonio and after Autodesk acquired Xanadu technology in 1988, Nelson continued working on the project as a non-managerial Distinguished Fellow in the San Francisco Bay Area until the Xanadu Operating Group was closed in 1992–1993.

Nelson later taught at Hokkaido University (1995–1996), Keio University (1996–2002), the University of Southampton, and the University of Nottingham. He was a fellow (2004–2006) and visiting fellow (2006–2008) at the Oxford Internet Institute, linked with Wadham College, Oxford. More recently, he has taught at Chapman University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Xanadu project did not succeed, and the reasons for its failure are debated. In 1995, journalist Gary Wolf wrote a critical article about Nelson and Xanadu for Wired, calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in computing history." Nelson disagreed with the article, called Wolf "Gory Jackal," and threatened to sue him. He also wrote a letter to Wired and published a detailed response to the article.

As early as 1972, a version of Xanadu developed by Cal Daniels failed when Nelson had to return a rented computer due to financial problems. Nelson said some parts of his vision were later realized by Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, but he disliked the Web, XML, and embedded markup. He believed Berners-Lee’s work was too simple compared to his original ideas. Jaron Lanier explained the differences between the World Wide Web and Nelson’s vision and what they meant.

Other projects

In 1957, Nelson worked together with others to write and produce a rock musical called "Anything and Everything." The musical was performed at Swarthmore College. In 1959, during his final year at Swarthmore, Nelson created a creative and funny film titled "The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow." In this film, the main character learns the meaning of life. Peter Schickele, a fellow student at Swarthmore College, composed the music for the film.

In 1965, Nelson shared a paper titled "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" at the ACM National Conference. In this paper, he introduced the term "hypertext."

In 1976, Nelson helped start a small computer store named "itty bitty machine company" (ibm). The store operated from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. In 1978, Nelson influenced IBM's plans by explaining how personal computers could be used. This idea helped shape the development of the IBM PC three years later.

From the 1960s until the mid-2000s, Nelson collected direct mail he received in his mailbox. These letters were from companies selling products in fields such as information technology, publishing, aerospace, and engineering. In 2017, the Internet Archive began to put these letters online in a collection called "Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons."

ZigZag

As of 2011, Nelson was working on a new system called ZigZag, which is explained on the Xanadu project's website. This website also has two versions of the Xanadu code available. He also created XanaduSpace, a tool for looking at linked documents together. An early version of this tool can be downloaded for free.

Influence and recognition

In January 1988, Byte magazine published an article about Nelson’s ideas, titled "Managing Immense Storage."

In 1998, Nelson received the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award at the Seventh WWW Conference in Brisbane, Australia.

In 2001, France honored Nelson by making him an Officier des Arts et Lettres. In 2007, he gave a lecture at the University of Southampton to celebrate his 70th birthday. In 2014, he was awarded a Special Recognition Award by ACM SIGCHI.

In 2014, Chapman University gave Nelson a Doctor of Science degree, honoris causa. The ceremony occurred during the 'Intertwingled' conference, which included Nelson and other important figures in computing, such as Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple Computer, and Wendy Hall, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery. At the conference, Nelson expressed confidence in the future of his Xanadu system, stating, "The world would have been a better place if I had succeeded, but I ain't dead yet."

Nelson is known for creating several new words that are now commonly used, especially in computing. These include:

• hypertext and hypermedia (created in 1963, first published in 1965)
• transclusion
• docuverse
• micropayment
• stretchtext
• virtuality
• intertwingularity
• teledildonics (created by Nelson in 1975, before it became widely known through Howard Rheingold)

Publications

Nelson publishes some of his books through his own company called Mindful Press.

• Life, Love, College, etc. (1959)
• Computer Lib/Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report (1974), Microsoft Press; revised in 1987 with a foreword by Stewart Brand. ISBN: 0-914845-49-7
• The Home Computer Revolution (1977)
• Literary Machines: The report on, and of, Project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow's intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom (1981), Mindful Press; published between 1980–1984, 1987, and 1990–1993 according to the 1993 edition
• The Future of Information (1997)
• "A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure." Journal of Digital Information, 5(1). Southampton, UK: British Computing Society. January 4, 2004. ISSN: 1368-7506
• Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way (2008; includes chapter summaries)
• POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization (2010), autobiography, Mindful Press.

Filmography

• The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow (1959) – an experimental student film created at Swarthmore College, with music composed by Peter Schickele

• "TED Talk presented at the TED2 Conference" (1990)
• "Here I Stand, at Age 80" (2017) – a birthday presentation given at the Internet Archive

A series of short documentaries was published on YouTube starting in 2012:

• "The Myth of Technology"
• "It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC"
• "The Database Mess"
• "Personal Computing – the Dance of Apple and Microsoft"
• "Hyperhistory"
• "The Real Story of the World Wide Web"
• "How Bitcoin Actually Works"
• "Closure: Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain"

• "I Think I Know Who Satoshi Is" (2014)
• "The Jackal's Curse: A Feature-Length Reply to 'The Curse of Xanadu'" (2019) – a response to an article by Gary Wolf published in Wired in 1995