Ted Nelson

Name	Ted Nelson
Birth date	June 17, 1937
Birth place	New York City
Ethnicity	Norwegian-American
Field	Inventor
Work institutions
Alma mater	Swarthmore College, Harvard University, Keio University
Known for	Hypertext}}

Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an 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, 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.

Ted Nelson promotes four maxims: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong”.

Career

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 it.

The Xanadu project itself failed to flourish, for a variety of reasons which are disputed. Journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history, "The Curse of Xanadu", on Nelson and his project in the June 1995 issue of Wired calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing". Nelson expressed his disgust on his website, referring to Wolf as a "Gory Jackal", and threatened to sue him. He also outlined his objections in a letter to Wired, and released a detailed rebuttal of the article.

Nelson claims some aspects of his vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, but he dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup - regarding Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his original vision:

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

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.

Ted Nelson is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag, which is described on the Xanadu project website, which also hosts two versions of the Xanadu code. He is also currently developing XanaduSpace - a system for the exploration of connected parallel documents (an early version of this software may be freely downloaded from xanarama.net. He is a visiting fellow at Oxford University - based at the 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 "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.

Personal life

He is the son of the late 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 in Greenwich Village with relatively little contact with his parents. He is partly of Norwegian descent.

Popular culture

The anime Serial Experiments Lain cites Project Xanadu as a precursor to The Wired (a fictional internet-like communications network and augmented reality system) and mentions Nelson as the originator of hypertext.

Populitism

Populitism is a neologism coined by Nelson, a portmanteau combining "populism" with "elite." 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."

Works

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

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)

A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure. 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) (Chapter summaries)

"POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization" (2010), autobiography

Quotes

“Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

“A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.”

“We should not impose regularity where it does not exist.”

“I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.”

References

External links

Ted Nelson's homepage

Detailed Ted Nelson bibliography

Xanadu project webpage

Transliterature - A Humanist Design

The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu in Screening the Past, July 2005 by Belinda Barnet

Ted Nelson and Xanadu, in The Electronic Labyrinth, 1993

Orality and Hypertext: An Interview with Ted Nelson

Way Out Of The Box , by Theodor Nelson, October 8, 1999

Software and Media for a New Democracy a talk given by Ted Nelson at the File festival Symposium/November/2005

Wired article, recalling interview with Nelson, August 2005

The Politics Of Internet Software 'Geeks Bearing Gifts', a talk given by Ted at the Oxford Internet Institute, November 30, 2005

Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature, a talk given by Ted at Google, January 29, 2007

Biography

Category:Ted Nelson Category:1937 births Category:American educators Category:Computer pioneers Category:Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Innovators Category:Internet pioneers Category:Living people Category:American people of Norwegian descent Category:Swarthmore College alumni Category:Officiers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres