Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963[1] and published them in 1965.[2] According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."[3]
Nelson earned a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959. While there, he made an experimental humorous student film, The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, in which the titular hero discovers the meaning of life. His contemporary at the college, musician and composer Peter Schickele, scored the film.[6] Following a year of graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago, Nelson began graduate work in Social Relations, then a department at Harvard University specializing in sociology, ultimately earning a M.A in sociology from the Department of Social Relations in 1962.[7] After Harvard, Nelson was a photographer and filmmaker for a year at John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute in Miami, Florida, where he briefly shared an office with Gregory Bateson. From 1964 to 1966, he was an instructor in sociology at Vassar College.
During college and graduate school, he began to envision a computer-based writing system that would provide a lasting repository for the world's knowledge, and also permit greater flexibility of drawing connections between ideas. This came to be known as Project Xanadu.
Much later in life, in 2002, he obtained his PhD in media and governance from Keio University.
Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960, with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. The effort is documented in the books Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974), The Home Computer Revolution (1977) and Literary Machines (1981). Much of his adult life has been devoted to working on Xanadu and advocating for it.
Nelson also conducted research and development under the auspices of the Nelson Organization (founder and president; 1968-1972) and the Computopia Corporation (co-founder; 1977-1978). Clients of the former firm included IBM, Brown University, Western Electric, the University of California, the Jewish Museum, the Fretheim Chartering Corporation and the Deering-Milliken Research Corporation. He has alleged that the Nelson Organization was envisaged as a clandestine funding conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency, which expressed interest in Project Xanadu at an early juncture; however, the promised funds failed to materialize after several benchmarks were met.
From 1980 to 1981, he was the editor of Creative Computing. At the behest of Xanadu developers Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene, Nelson joined San Antonio, Texas-based Datapoint as chief software designer (1981–1982), remaining with the company as a media specialist and technical writer until its Asher Edelman-driven restructuring in 1984. Following several San Antonio-based consultancies and the acquisition of Xanadu technology by Autodesk in 1988, he continued working on the project as a non-managerial Distinguished Fellow in the San Francisco Bay Area until the divestiture of the Xanadu Operating Group in 1992–1993.
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 his project in the June 1995 issue of Wired, calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing".[10] On his own website, Nelson expressed his disgust with the criticisms, referring to Wolf as "Gory Jackal", and threatened to sue him.[11] He also outlined his objections in a letter to Wired,[12] and released a detailed rebuttal of the article.[13]
As early as 1972, a demonstration iteration developed by Cal Daniels failed to reach fruition when Nelson was forced to return the project's rented Data General Novaminicomputer due to financial exigencies. Nelson has stated that some aspects of his vision are being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, but he dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup – regarding Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his original vision:
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.[14]
Jaron Lanier explained the difference between the World Wide Web and Nelson's vision, and the implications:
A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's] network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. It's a small simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for culture and the economy.[15]
Other projects
In 1957, while a student, Nelson co-wrote and co-produced what he describes as a pioneering rock musical. Entitled "Anything and Everything", it was produced and performed at Swarthmore College.[16]
In 1965, he presented the paper "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" at the ACM National Conference, in which he coined the term "hypertext".[2]
In 1976, Nelson co-founded and briefly served as the advertising director of the "itty bitty machine company", or "ibm", a small computer retail store that operated from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. The itty bitty machine company was one of the few retail stores to sell the Apple I computer. In 1978, he had a significant impact upon IBM's thinking when he outlined his vision of the potential of personal computing to the team that three years later launched the IBM PC.[17]
From the 1960s to the mid-2000s, Nelson built an extensive collection of direct advertising mail he received in his mailbox, mainly from companies selling products in IT, print/publishing, aerospace, and engineering. In 2017, the Internet Archive began to publish it online in scanned form, in a collection titled "Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons".[18][19][20]
As of 2011, Nelson was working on a new information structure, ZigZag,[21] which is described on the Xanadu project website, which also hosts two versions of the Xanadu code. He also developed XanaduSpace, a system for the exploration of connected parallel documents (an early version of this software may be freely downloaded).[22]
Influence and recognition
In January 1988 Byte magazine published an article about Nelson's ideas, titled "Managing Immense Storage".[23] This stimulated discussions within the computer industry, and encouraged people to experiment with Hypertext features.[citation needed]
In 2014, Nelson was conferred with a Doctor of Science degree, honoris causa, by Chapman University. The ceremony took place during the 'Intertwingled' conference, featuring Nelson and other prominent figures in the field, including Apple Computer founder Steve Wozniak and former Association for Computing Machinery president Wendy Hall. At the conference, Nelson stated confidence in the potential of his Xanadu system, saying 'The world would have been a better place if I had succeeded, but I ain't dead yet.'[26]
Neologisms
Nelson is credited with coining several new words that have come into common usage especially in the world of computing. Among them are:
"hypertext" and "hypermedia", both coined by Nelson in 1963 and first published in 1965
Many of his books are published through his own company, Mindful Press.[27]
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, revised edition 1987: ISBN0-914845-49-7[28]
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, Sausalito, California; publication dates as listed in the 93.1 (1993) edition: 1980–84, 1987, 1990–93
Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way (2008; Chapter summaries)
POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization (2010), autobiography, published by Mindful Press via Lulu[29][30]
Related Research Articles
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.
Memex [memory expansion] is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory".
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided to by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is known as anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink. A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext.
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
This article presents a timeline of hypertext technology, including "hypermedia" and related human–computer interaction projects and developments from 1945 on. The term hypertext is credited to the author and philosopher Ted Nelson.
The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. It was the first hypertext system available on commercial equipment that novices could use.
Literary Machines is a book first published in 1981 by Ted Nelson and republished nine times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu. It also includes other theories by Nelson, including "tumblers" for addressing bits in files past and present, "transclusion" as a method for including original work in one's own work, and "micropayments" to pay for the use. The format of the book is nonlinear, as the chapters are arranged in such a way that the text can be read out of order.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:
Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.
Andries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, Hypertext Editing System (HES) in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice along with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and John Hughes. He also co-founded the precursor of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference.
Marc Stiegler is an American science fiction author and software developer. He co-authored Valentina: Soul in Sapphire (1984) with Joseph H. Delaney. The novel features Valentina, a computer program that is one of science fiction's earliest examples of sentient software, in contrast to mainframe-based AIs such as HAL and Colossus. His notable works also include David's Sling (1988), a techno-thriller that explores the concept of e-democracy.
ZigZag is a data model, invented by Ted Nelson, that deconstructs the spreadsheet to allow irregular relations, at the same time generalizing the idea to multiple dimensions.
The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The Mundaneum has been identified as a milestone in the history of data collection and management, and as a precursor to the Internet.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines is a 1974 book by Ted Nelson, printed as a two-front-cover paperback to indicate its "intertwingled" nature. Originally self-published by Nelson, it was republished with a foreword by Stewart Brand in 1987 by Microsoft Press.
Roger Everett Gregory is a US computer programmer, technologist, and scientist. Gregory's work in project Xanadu made him one of the earliest pioneers of hypertext technology, which helped lay the foundations for the hyperlink technology that underlies the World Wide Web. Gregory attended the University of Michigan as a mathematics major. In the 1970s, he founded the Ann Arbor Computer Club, similar to the West Coast's Home Brew Computer Club.
Hyperland is a 50-minute-long documentary film about hypertext and surrounding technologies. It was written by Douglas Adams and produced and directed by Max Whitby for BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker, with whom Adams had already worked on Doctor Who, as a personification of a software agent.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.
↑ Ted Nelson (1959). "The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow". Student film available on YouTube. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved November 2, 2013.
↑ Keep, Christopher; McLaughlin, Tim; Parmar, Robin (July 2000). "Ted Nelson and Xanadu". The Electronic Labyrinth. University of Alberta. Archived from the original on September 28, 2022. Retrieved September 28, 2022.
↑ Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. p. 227
↑ Ted Nelson (book and lyrics) and Dick Caplan (music), Russ Ryan (poster and album label cartoons) (November 23, 1957). ""Anything & Everything""– via Internet Archive.
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