Theodor Holm Nelson is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
sociologist, philosopher, and
pioneerAn 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 technologyInformation 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 "
hypertextHypertext 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 "
hypermediaHypermedia 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
transclusionIn 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...
,
virtualityVirtuality 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...
,
intertwingularityIntertwingularity 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
teledildonicsTeledildonics 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 XanaduProject 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 MachinesLiterary 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...
.