Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia, as well as transclusion, virtuality, and intertwingularity. During college and graduate school, he started developing Project Xanadu, a computer-based writing system that would provide a lasting repository for the world’s knowledge, and also permit greater flexibility of drawing connections between ideas. He is the author of Computer Lib / Dream Machines—a minority report (1974), Literary Machines (1981), The Future of Information (1997), among others.