Ted Nelson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ted Nelson
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Nelson in 2011
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| Born | June 17, 1937 |
| Alma mater | Swarthmore College (BA) University of Chicago Harvard University (MA) Keio University (PhD) |
| Known for | Hypertext |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Information technology, philosophy, and sociology |
| Institutions | Project Xanadu |
Theodor Holm Nelson, born on June 17, 1937, is an American expert in computers and ideas. He is known for creating the words hypertext and hypermedia in 1963. He shared these ideas with the world in 1965. Think of him as a creative thinker who saw the future of how we would connect information.
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Early Life and Learning
Ted Nelson's parents were famous! His father, Ralph Nelson, was a director who won an Emmy Award. His mother, Celeste Holm, was an actress who won an Academy Award. Their marriage was short, so Ted was mostly raised by his grandparents. He grew up in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village, New York.
Ted went to Swarthmore College and earned a degree in philosophy in 1959. He also studied sociology at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. He received a master's degree from Harvard in 1962. Later, in 2002, he earned his PhD from Keio University in Japan.
While he was in college, Ted started imagining a new way to use computers. He thought computers could store all the world's knowledge. He also wanted a way to easily link different ideas together. This big idea later became known as Project Xanadu.
Project Xanadu: A Vision for Connected Information
Ted Nelson first dreamed up Project Xanadu in the early 1960s. His goal was to create a computer network that was easy for everyone to use. He started calling it Xanadu in 1966. He wrote about his ideas in books like Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) and Literary Machines (1981). Ted spent much of his life working on Xanadu and telling others about it.
How Ted Nelson Supported His Project
To keep Project Xanadu going, Ted worked in many different roles. He was a consultant at places like Brown University and Bell Labs. He also worked at CBS Laboratories and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He even taught at Swarthmore College.
Ted also started his own companies, like the Nelson Organization. He worked with big companies like IBM. Later, he joined Datapoint as a chief software designer. He continued to work on Xanadu after Autodesk bought some of its technology.
After that, Ted was a visiting professor at universities around the world. These included Hokkaido University and Keio University in Japan, and the University of Southampton and the University of Nottingham in the UK. He also taught classes at Chapman University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Why Xanadu Didn't Take Off
Project Xanadu faced many challenges and didn't become widely used. Some people called it a "vaporware" project, meaning it was talked about a lot but never fully released. Ted Nelson disagreed with these criticisms.
Ted believed that some parts of his vision were achieved by the World Wide Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. However, Ted didn't like the World Wide Web as much as his own idea. He felt it was too simple and had problems.
He said that the World Wide Web's links often broke. He also noted that links only went one way, and it was hard to trace where information came from.
Jaron Lanier, another computer expert, explained the key difference. In Ted's vision, links were "two-way." This meant each piece of information would know what other information was linked to it. This would help keep ideas in their proper context.
Other Cool Projects and Ideas
Ted Nelson has been involved in many other creative projects.
- In 1957, he helped write a rock musical called "Anything and Everything" at Swarthmore College.
- In 1959, he made a funny student film called The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow.
- In 1965, he gave a famous speech where he first used the word "hypertext."
In 1976, Ted helped start a small computer store called the "itty bitty machine company." In 1978, he shared his ideas about personal computers with IBM. This helped IBM create their first personal computer, the IBM PC, a few years later.
Ted also collected a huge amount of junk mail he received over the years. This collection, called "Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons," is now available online for people to explore.
ZigZag: A New Way to Organize Information
Ted Nelson has also worked on a new way to structure information called ZigZag. You can find information about it on the Xanadu project website. He also created XanaduSpace, which helps explore connected documents.
Awards and Recognition
Ted Nelson has received several honors for his pioneering work:
- In 1998, he won the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.
- In 2001, France made him an "Officier des Arts et Lettres," which is a special honor for people in arts and literature.
- In 2014, he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Chapman University. At the ceremony, he said, "The world would have been a better place if I had succeeded, but I ain't dead yet." This shows he still believes in his vision.
Words Ted Nelson Invented
Ted Nelson is famous for creating new words that we now use every day in computing:
- Hypertext and hypermedia: These words describe text and media that are linked together, allowing you to jump from one piece of information to another.
- Transclusion: This is about including content from one document into another without copying it.
- Virtuality: This refers to things that exist in a computer but not in the real world.
- Intertwingularity: This word means that everything is connected in complex ways.
See also
In Spanish: Ted Nelson para niños
