View source for Ted Nelson

{{Infobox Scientist
| name                    = Ted Nelson
| image                   = Ted Nelson at Hypertext-03.jpg
| caption                 = 
| birth_date              = 1937
| birth_place             = [[New York City]]
| death_date              = 
| death_place             = 
| field                   = [[Inventing|Inventor]]
| work_institutions       = [http://aus.xanadu.com/ted/] [http://www.xanadu.com/] 
| alma_mater              = [[Swarthmore College]], [[Harvard University]], [[Keio University]]
| doctoral_advisor        = 
| doctoral_students       = 
| known_for               = [[Hypertext]]}}

'''Theodor Holm Nelson''' ('''Ted Nelson''', born 1937) is an [[United States|American]] [[sociologist]], [[philosopher]], and pioneer of [[information technology]]. He coined the terms "[[hypertext]]" and "[[hypermedia]]" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words  ''[[transclusion]]'', ''[[virtuality (software design)|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." However, he is known for inventing many new words ([[neologism]]s) which few other people understand (such as "intertwingularity"), and his remarks contain humor to entertain rather than just inform. Consequently, some of his ideas have been met with negative reactions.

From a [[pessimist]] viewpoint, Ted Nelson promotes four maxims: "most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong".<ref name="Wired_3_06">See chapter II, 3rd paragraph, 3rd and 4th sentence in: "The Curse of Xanadu" {{cite web | title=The Curse of Xanadu 
| date=June 1995 | publisher=Wired [magazine] | author=Gary Wolf |  url=https://www.wired.com/wired/archive//3.06/xanadu_pr.html | accessdate=2008-06-03}}</ref>

==Career==
Nelson started [[Project Xanadu]] in 1960. He wanted to create a new computer network that was easy to use and easy to understand. He wrote about the project in his books ''Computer Lib/Dream Machines'' (1974) and ''Literary Machines'' (1981). He has spent much of his adult life working on Project Xanadu and telling people about its benefits.

The Xanadu project was not very successful. There were many reasons, but not everyone agrees why the project did not go well. Journalist [[Gary Wolf (journalist)|Gary Wolf]] published an unflattering history, [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html "The Curse of Xanadu"], on Nelson and his project in the June 1995 issue of ''[[Wired magazine|Wired]]''. Nelson expressed his disgust on his website,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://ted.hyperland.com/whatsay/|title=What They Say|website=ted.hyperland.com}}</ref> referring to Wolf as a "Gory Jackal", and threatened to sue him. He also outlined his objections in a letter to ''Wired'',<ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://www.wired.com/1995/09/rants-raves-123/|title=Rants & Raves|first=WIRED|last=Staff|magazine=Wired |date=1 September 1995|publisher=|via=www.wired.com}}</ref> and released a detailed rebuttal of the article.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://vinci.org/rlv/c/xanadu2/index.html|title=Ted Nelson: ararat|website=vinci.org|access-date=2010-09-26|archive-date=2010-12-01|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101201091438/http://vinci.org/rlv/c/xanadu2/index.html|url-status=dead}}</ref>

Nelson says that [[Tim Berners-Lee]] made some ideas from Xanadu become true by inventing the [[World Wide Web]]. But, Nelson dislikes the World Wide Web, [[XML]], and all embedded [[markup language|markup]]. Nelson thinks that Berners-Lee's work is a much too simple way of doing his original plan:

<blockquote>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 ([http://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html Ted Nelson one-liners ])
</blockquote>

Nelson co-founded [[Itty bitty machine company]], or "IBM", which was a small computer retail store operating from 1977 to 1980 in [[Evanston, Illinois]]. The Itty bitty machine company was one of the few retail stores to sell the original [[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.<ref>[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/when-big-blue-got-a-glimpse-of-the-future/ When Big Blue Got a Glimpse of the Future].</ref>

Ted Nelson is currently working on a new information structure, [[ZigZag (software)|ZigZag]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://xanadu.com/zigzag/|title=True Structure: ZigZag®|website=xanadu.com}}</ref> More information about ZigZag is on the Xanadu project website. That website also has two versions of the Xanadu code that visitors can download. He is also currently developing XanaduSpace<ref>{{cite web|url=http://xanarama.net/|title=レーシック手術とは何か|website=xanarama.net}}</ref> - a system for the exploration of connected parallel documents (an early version of this software may be freely downloaded from [http://xanarama.net].  He is a visiting fellow at [[Oxford University]] - based at the [http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ Oxford Internet Institute] - where he works 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 Nelson 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 "[[Ordre des Arts et des Lettres|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.

In 2007 he celebrated his 70th birthday by giving an invited birthday lecture at the [[University of Southampton]].<ref>70th Birthday Lecture: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE2A95HXP4Y Intertwingularity: where ideas collide]</ref>

==Personal life==
He is the son of the late [[Emmy Award]]-winning [[television director|director]] [[Ralph Nelson]] and the [[Academy Awards|Academy Award]]-winning [[Actor|actress]] [[Celeste Holm]].

His parents' marriage was brief, and he was mostly raised by his grandparents in [[Greenwich Village]], with relatively little contact with his parents.<ref>[http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/nelson.html  Internet Pioneers from Ibiblio].</ref> He is partly of [[Norway|Norwegian]] descent.

==Popular culture==
The [[anime]] ''Serial Experiments Lain'' cites Project Xanadu as a precursor to The Wired (a fictional [[internet]]-like [[communication]]s [[Telecommunications network|network]] and [[augmented reality]] system) and mentions Nelson as the originator of [[hypertext]].

==Populitism==

''Populitism'' ("pop-u-leet-ism") is another [[neologism]] coined by Nelson, as a combination of the word "populism" with "elite". It refers to treating the general populace with the privileges of [[elitism]]. The word suggests the society-of-text envisioned by theorists like Shoshana Zuboff and Jay David Bolter, a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function. A "populite" culture might mark the first step toward realization of [[Jean-Francois Lyotard]]'s "game of perfect information" where all have equal access to the world of data, and where "[g]iven equal competence (no longer in the acquisition of knowledge, but in its production), what extra performativity depends on in the final analysis is 'imagination,' which allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game." This is the utopia of information-in-process, the ultimate wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100 percent efficiency into capital, the mechanism of that magical process being nomology or rule-making—admittedly a rather specialized form of "imagination."<ref>{{cite journal|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27310|title=You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media|first=Stuart|last=Moulthrop|date=5 January 1991|journal=Postmodern Culture|volume=1|issue=3|via=Project MUSE|doi=10.1353/pmc.1991.0019|s2cid=144363911}}</ref>

==Works by Ted Nelson==
* ''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|0-914845-49-7}}  <ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/16/science/peripherals-a-book-that-grew-up.html|title=PERIPHERALS; A Book That Grew Up|first=L. R.|last=Shannon|newspaper=The New York Times |date=16 February 1988|publisher=}}</ref>
* ''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, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993
* ''The Future of Information'' (1997)
* ''[http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/131 A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20041009214354/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html |date=2004-10-09 }}''. Journal of Digital Information, Volume 5 Issue 1. Article No. 298, July 16, 2004
* ''Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way'' (2008) ([http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/gbgContents.html Chapter summaries] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20041009214354/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html |date=2004-10-09 }})

==Notes==
{{Reflist}}

==Other websites==
{{wikiquote}}
* [http://ted.hyperland.com/ Ted Nelson's homepage]
* [http://www.mprove.de/diplom/referencesNelson.html Detailed Ted Nelson bibliography]
* [http://www.xanadu.net/ Xanadu project webpage]
* [http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr_18/BBfr18a.html ''The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu''] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20041009214354/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html |date=2004-10-09 }} in [http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast Screening the Past] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130116134141/http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast |date=2013-01-16 }}, July 2005 by Belinda Barnet
* [http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0155.html ''Ted Nelson and Xanadu''] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20041009214354/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html |date=2004-10-09 }}, in ''The Electronic Labyrinth'', 1993
* [http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html The Curse of Xanadu] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070214112210/http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html |date=2007-02-14 }}, June 1995 Wired  article by Gary Wolf
* [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html reactions to The Curse of Xanadu], September 1995 Wired magazine, from [[Vint Cerf]], [[Jonathan Vos Post]] and Ted Nelson,
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20041009214354/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html Orality and Hypertext]: An Interview with Ted Nelson
* [http://ted.hyperland.com/TQdox/zifty.d9-TQframer.html ''Way Out Of The Box ''], by Theodor Nelson, October 8, 1999
* [http://www.file.org.br/file2005/textos/symposium/eng/tednelson.htm Software and Media for a New Democracy] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110929165025/http://www.file.org.br/file2005/textos/symposium/eng/tednelson.htm |date=2011-09-29 }} a talk given by Ted Nelson at the [http://www.file.org.br File festival] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141218144412/http://www.file.org.br/ |date=2014-12-18 }} Symposium/November/2005
* [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html Article/interview with Nelson], ''Wired'', August 2005
* [http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20051121_112 The Politics of Internet Software 'Geeks Bearing Gifts'] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130709083545/http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20051121_112 |date=2013-07-09 }}, a talk given by Ted at the Oxford Internet Institute, November 30, 2005
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8329031368429444452 Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120506200305/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8329031368429444452 |date=2012-05-06 }}, a talk given by Ted at [[Google]], January 29, 2007
* [http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/nelson.html Biography] at ibiblio.org

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Nelson, Ted}}
[[Category:American sociologists]]
[[Category:American philosophers]]
[[Category:People from New York City]]
[[Category:1937 births]]
[[Category:Harvard University alumni]]
[[Category:Living people]]