Nelson, Theodor Holm (Ted)

1937–

Software Developer, Author, Hypertext Pioneer

Of all the pioneering figures of the Internet age, perhaps none is quite as fascinating as the iconoclastic Ted Nelson. Variously described as a visionary, a “discombobulated genius,” and a misanthropic crank, Nelson's place in the history of computing would have been secure even if he had never done anything but discover and describe the concept of hypertext. In fact, his reputation is forever secure, some might argue, precisely because during the past four decades since identifying hypertext, Nelson has accomplished very little and has spent a lifetime's worth of 16-hour working days doing it. This would be a very uncharitable view; Nelson has written at least three highly influential books in the interim. But mostly, he has spent the last 41 years perfecting the grandly elusive, World Wide Web–like Xanadu project.

Nelson grew up in New York's Greenwich Village, the son of a movie-director father and actress mother; he was raised by his elderly grandparents. His heroes, according to a 1995 Wired article, were nonconformists and businessmen like Buckminster Fuller, Orson Welles, and Walt Disney. Never ashamed of his own genius, Nelson described himself as having been “a brilliant child.”

He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College; during his years there, he also spent time in show business as an actor and as a record producer. At age 23, in 1960, Nelson became a graduate student at Harvard University. One of his projects there was to create a “writing system” inspired by Vannevar Bush's seminal Atlantic Monthly article, “As We May Think.” Some of Nelson's design features involved the use of computers to compare alternate versions of texts side-by-side, backing up sequentially through earlier versions of documents, and revising by outline. “I was furious at the process of writing and how long it took, the organizational problems and the arbitrariness of writing,” Nelson told an interviewer in [Page 341]1996. “The process that fascinated me most was cut and paste.” While working on this project, Nelson invented (he prefers to say “discovered”) hypertext.

Hypertext is a method of using computers to prepare and publish text, allowing readers to pave their own unique paths through written material. Its chief characteristic is the hyperlink, simple lines of code that are used today to create links among Web pages, Word documents, and other electronic files; hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the basic point-and-click language of the World Wide Web. The idea was entirely Nelson's, and it evolved during that graduate-school term project at Harvard. However, he did not finish the project's source code, and received a grade of “incomplete” for the assignment.

Nelson coined the words “hypertext” and “hypermedia” in a paper delivered at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in 1965. But it wasn't until 1967 that hypertext was demonstrated for the first time (Nelson was not the one who demonstrated it).

Also at the 1965 conference, he added to his hypertext concept an idea he called “zippered lists,” which would create texts that could be linked to related elements from other writings. These lists could link up large sections of books, small sections of academic papers, entire newspaper pages, or single paragraphs from a diary; any linked combination of writing was possible. It would even be possible to compose entirely new works by fusing material from others' writings and zipping them together via Nelson's favored “cutand-paste” method.

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