The Curse of Xanadu

Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson, speaking at the Tech Museum of Innovation in 2011
Born	(1937-06-17) June 17, 1937 (age 80) Chicago, Illinois, United States
Alma mater	Swarthmore College Harvard University Keio University
Known for	Hypertext
Scientific career
Fields	Information technology, philosophy, and sociology
Institutions	Project Xanadu
Influences	Vannevar Bush

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

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. While there, he made an experimental humorous student film titled 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. In 1960 Nelson began graduate work at Harvard University in philosophy, earning a master's degree in sociology in 1963. Much later in life, in 2002, he obtained a Doctorate in Media and Governance from Keio University.

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. This came to be known as Project Xanadu.

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 for it.