Ted Nelson (b. 1937) is an American information theorist who coined the words hypertext and hypermedia in the 1960s and launched Project Xanadu, a lifelong effort to build a deeply linked, two-way document system.
Key work in the library
- Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) — a populist manifesto for personal computing fused with a vision of interactive hypertext.
Significance
Nelson is the bridge between Vannevar Bush’s associative Memex and Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web: the idea of a document graph anyone can author and own. His insistence that ordinary people must understand and control computers prefigures the ownership and equity principles of the Independent Internet, and his work is a cultural pillar of decentralization.