Ted Nelson
Overview
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer
Innovator
An innovator in a general sense, is a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality something better than before. That often opens up a new area for others and achieves an innovation.-History:...

 of information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

. He coined the terms "hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...

" and "hypermedia
Hypermedia
Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....

" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also has been credited with first using the words transclusion
Transclusion
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...

, virtuality
Virtuality (software design)
Virtuality is a term used by Ted Nelson for what he considers the central issues of software design. "Virtuality" refers to the seeming of anything, as opposed to its reality. . Everything has a reality and a virtuality. Nelson divides virtuality into two parts: conceptual structure and feel...

, intertwingularity
Intertwingularity
Intertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.Nelson wrote in Computer Lib/Dream Machines :EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED...

, and teledildonics
Teledildonics
Teledildonics are electronic sex toys that can be controlled by a computer to reach orgasm. Promoters of these devices have claimed since the 1980s they are the "next big thing" in cybersex technology...

.
Nelson founded Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper...

 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
Literary Machines
Literary Machines is a book first published in 1980 by Ted Nelson, and republished 9 times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu...

.
Quotations

You can and must understand computers now!

Slogan. (The insistence that ordinary people need to understand computers is remarkable for its era: the first personal computers were not available until 1975.)

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Computer Lib p. 42 / Dream Machines p.45

I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.

Computer Lib

If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.

Dream Machines, p 22.

Everybody has only a 24-hour day. Most people, if they increase consumption of one medium (like magazines or books) will cut down on another (like TV). This drastically reduces the sort of growth some people have been expecting.

Dream Machines

 
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