Ted Nelson is born 1937 in New York City, New York. He is an American pioneer of information technology, a philosopher and a sociologist. A somewhat controversial figure in the computing world. He coined the term “hypertext” and “hypermedia” in 1963 and published in 1965. Nelson coined the terms transclution, virtuality, and intertwingularity (in Literary Machines) .His biggest hypertext project was Xanadu, was to be a world-wide electronic publishing system that would have created a sort universal library for the people. He has been called “one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age.”
Nelson was raised by his grandparents in Greenwich Village, New York. His father is a movie director and his mother an actor. He had little contact with his father and almost none with his mother. He was lonely as a child and had problems caused by his Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
Nelson attended Swarthmore college where he earned a BA in philosophy. In 1960, he enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. During his first year he attempted a term project creating a writing system similar to a word processor, but that would allow different versions and documents to be linked together non-linearly, by association. This was, in part, an attempt to keep track of his own sometimes frantic associations and daydreaming brought about by his ADD.
Nelson did not complete the project, but he continued to work on it after that semester and it became the overriding concern of his life. In 1965, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery in which he coined the term hypertext. Nelson’s system was very similar to that envisioned by Vannevar Bush.
Human-Computer Interaction 