I’m sure you’re familiar with the terms hypertext and hypermedia. They’re older than you might expect; they were both coined in 1963 by Theodor (Ted) Nelson, whose 87th birthday is today.
Nelson came up with the terms in connection with Project Xanadu, his plan for a networked computer-based writing system that would enable connecting (linking) between ideas. He started the project in 1960, decades before Tim Berners-Lee (who was only 5 years old at the time) came up with the World Wide Web. He published his ideas in three books: Computer Lib/Dream Machines, The Home Computer Revolution, and Literary Machines. The first one, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, has two titles because it was designed so you would read it through, then flip it over and read the rest in the other direction. It was a pretty innovative bit of graphic design, which Nelson himself was responsible for. It’s considered the first book about the personal computer. Nelson coined another word to describe how the ideas in the first part connected with those in the second part: intertwingled.
Nelson has worked as a researcher and consultant at any number of organizations and universities, from the publisher Harcourt Brace and Company to the University of Illinois, Bell Labs, and Brown University. At Brown he developed the Hypertext Editing System and the File Retrieval and Editing System. The whole time (and in fact throughout most of his life) he’s kept working on Project Xanadu.
Nelson anticipated most of the problems with the World Wide Web and tried to design Project Xanadu to overcome them. Links in Xanadu can’t break. If you see a quotation, you can automatically link to its source. There’s a version management system built in. And there’s no possibility of plagiarism, because all links are bidirectional and there’s a payment system built in. Nelson regards the World Wide Web as dumb, oversimplified system and doesn’t like it or even the idea of embedded markup (which doesn’t exist in his system).
On the other hand, you can use the World Wide Web anywhere right now, and Project Xanadu, even with a 25-year head start, has never shipped (although there is or was at least one demo system available).
Throughout his career, Nelson has had a great deal of influence on various companies, projects, and products. He outlined his vision of personal computing to the team at IBM that came out with the IBM PC three years later, and helped Apple market their first product, the Apple I. In addition, any hypertext system can be traced back to his ideas (not to mention further back to Vannevar Bush). Nelson is also responsible for “virtuality” — the word, that is.
Nelson doesn’t consider himself a technologist, exactly. He has called himself the Orson Welles of software,” although to be honest I’m not entirely sure what that means. In spite of being a researcher and academic for his entire career, Nelson didn’t actually earn his PhD until 2002 at Keio University in Tokyo. He says, about his lifetime project, “The world would have been a better place if I had succeeded, but I ain’t dead yet.”
