Presentation1
- 1. A Living Legend Ted Nelson
- 2. The Beginning of a Pioneer Ted Nelson (Theodor Holm Nelson) was born in 1937. Nelson was raised by his grandparents in Greenwich Village, New York. His father was a movie director and his mother an actress, therefore he had little contact with them in his youth years. Nelson was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) at an early age and was often consider a lonely child.
- 3. Ted Nelson’s Early Achievements Swarthmore college is the school Nelson earned his BA in Philosophy. In 1960, he enrolled into graduate school at Harvard. In Nelson’s first year attending Harvard, his attempts on a term project creating a writing system similar to a word processor were altered to the different versions and documents to be linked together nonlinearly, by association. Although Nelson never completed his term project, he did continue to work on it after that year and set aside his concerns of life. In 1965, at the Association for Computing Machinery, Nelson presented his paper in which he coined the term hypertext for the first time. Many say his system was very similar to Vannevar Bush’s visions.
- 4. Description Nelson characterized himself as a person who forms paradigms and then creates words to express them. What is a Paradigm? Definition: A paradigm is a typical pattern or an example of something. Also connotes the ideas of a mental picture and pattern of thought. Nelson had little formal training in computers. In 1974, he self published his landmark tome on personal computing, Computer Lib/ Dream Machines. This quickly drew an underground fan base of computer hackers, media theorists, and experimental artists. (Reference: Multimedia from Wagner to VIRTUAL REALITY, page 162 paragraph 2.)
- 5. Ted Nelson’s Contribution To Media History Ted Nelson is a visionary who is credited with coining the term hypertext. His book Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Mindful Press) described the importance of hypertext systems. He expanded this concept by mapping out a distributed interlinked hypertext system he called Xanadu, in which readers could follow their interests over a network to wherever relevant resources resided. Furthermore, anyone could publish their work in this interlinked system. The World Wide Web bears an uncanny resemblance to some essential features of Xanadu, which is no coincidence; some of the Web's developers acknowledge that Nelson's ideas influenced them strongly. There is a Web location called Xanadu devoted to Nelson's ideas. Nelson notes that networked hypermedia goes beyond a new technical system; it has more radical implication because it promotes(Reference: http://www.tfh-berlin.de/~weberwu/ds/TedNelson.html)
- 6. Small Facts Project Xanadu was owned by XOC, Inc. in the years of 1988-1992. Project Xanadu is no longer affiliated with XOC, Inc., or with the software developed there. The mission for Project Xanadu was not to create the World Wide Web.
- 7. The Influence of Project Xanadu Lotus Notes, created by Ray Ozzie HyperWave(tm), created by Hermann Maurer and team MicroCosm(tm), created by Wendy
- 8. For More Information on Ted Nelson http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/nelson.html http://illuminationgallery.net/wr/hypertext/nelson.html http://xanadu.com.au/ted/