Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson bigraphy, stories - Information technology pioneer, sociologist and philosopher

Ted Nelson : biography

June 17, 1937 –

Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published them in 1965.

He also has been credited with first using the words transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity, and teledildonics.

Quotes

  • “Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong"
  • “A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.”
  • “We should not impose regularity where it does not exist.”
  • “I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.”
  • “The World Wide Web was 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.”

Personal life

Nelson is the son of Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and the Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm.

His parents’ marriage was brief and he was mostly raised by his grandparents, first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village.

Nelson earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 1959. In 1960 he began graduate work at Harvard in philosophy. During college and graduate school, he envisioned 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.

Press

In January 1988 BYTE computer journal published an article about Nelson’s ideas, titled; "Managing Immense Storage". This stimulated discussions within the computer industry, and encouraged people to experiment with Hypertext features.

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, Nelson was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.

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 was a visiting fellow from 2004 through 2006.

In 2007 he celebrated his 70th birthday by giving an invited birthday lecture at the University of Southampton.70th Birthday Lecture:

Notes

Populitism

Populitism is a neologism coined by Nelson, a portmanteau combining "populism" with "elite."

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 book Computer Lib / 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 on Nelson and his project in the June 1995 issue of Wired calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing". Nelson expressed his disgust on his website, referring to Wolf as "Gory Jackal", and threatened to sue him. He also outlined his objections in a letter to Wired, and released a detailed rebuttal of the article.

Nelson states that some aspects of his vision are in the process of 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.