[Home](https://tednelsonfan.com/) / Biography # Forty entries, 1937 to now. Every line is from his own pages, Wikipedia, the Oxford Internet Institute, the Internet Archive or the other sources listed, and says which. Where accounts differ by a year, both years are shown. ## The short version Theodor Holm Nelson, born in Chicago on 17 June 1937, is the American information-technology pioneer, philosopher and sociologist who coined the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published them in 1965. In 1960, as a Harvard graduate student, he began Project Xanadu, the original hypertext project: a worldwide system of documents with visible, two-way connections, in which any passage can appear in any other document by reference (transclusion) while staying linked to its origin. His 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines told ordinary people they could and must understand computers, and his 1981 book Literary Machines laid out the Xanadu design. He holds degrees from Swarthmore, Harvard and Keio, was made an Officier des Arts et Lettres by France in 2001, and is the son of film director Ralph Nelson and actress Celeste Holm. - Born 17 June 1937, Chicago, Illinois. - Parents Ralph Nelson (1916-1987), director; Celeste Holm (1917-2012), actress. Married 1936, divorced 1939. - Education B.A. Philosophy, Swarthmore, 1959. Graduate sociology, University of Chicago, one year. M.A. Sociology, Harvard, 1963 (his page) or 1962 (Wikipedia). Ph.D. Media and Governance, Keio, 2002. - Project Xanadu Founded 1960. Autodesk 1988-92. Udanax source release 1998-99. XanaduSpace 2007. OpenXanadu 2014. - Books Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, 1987), The Home Computer Revolution (1977), Literary Machines (1981-93), The Future of Information (1997), Geeks Bearing Gifts (2008), Possiplex (2010). - Posts Vassar 1964-66; Brown (HES) 1967; UIC 1973-76; Creative Computing 1980-81; Datapoint 1981-84; Autodesk Distinguished Fellow; Hokkaido 1995-96; Keio 1996-2002; Southampton, Nottingham; Oxford Internet Institute 2004-08; Chapman; UC Santa Cruz. - Honors Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award 1998; Officier des Arts et Lettres 2001; ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition Award 2014; Hon. D.Sc., Chapman 2014. - Patent US 6,262,736 (ZigZag), 17 July 2001. ## Year by year - 1937 ### Born in Chicago Theodor Holm Nelson is born on 17 June to film and television director Ralph Nelson and actress Celeste Holm, who married in 1936 and divorced in 1939. He is raised largely by his grandparents, in Chicago and then Greenwich Village. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1957 ### A rock musical at Swarthmore Co-writes and co-produces Anything and Everything at Swarthmore College, two years before graduating. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1959 ### B.A. in philosophy; a film and a first book Graduates from Swarthmore with a B.A. in philosophy (his own page and Wikipedia say 1959; one HCI history page says 1960). Makes the student film The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, scored by Peter Schickele, and publishes Life, Love, College, etc. Source: [his own Who I Am page](https://ted.hyperland.com/whoIam/). - 1960 ### Project Xanadu begins As a Harvard graduate student he starts what becomes Project Xanadu, the original hypertext project, as a term project: a writing system in which text could be compared, versioned and linked. xanadu.com still carries the line Founded 1960. Source: [xanadu.com](https://xanadu.com/). - 1962-63 ### Dolphins, Bateson and a master's degree Works as photographer and filmmaker at John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute in Miami, sharing an office with Gregory Bateson. Earns an M.A. in sociology from Harvard's Department of Social Relations (1963 on his own page; 1962 on Wikipedia). Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1963 ### The words hypertext and hypermedia Coins hypertext and hypermedia. He would later list them first among the words he introduced. Source: [his own Who I Am page](https://ted.hyperland.com/whoIam/). - 1964-66 ### Teaching at Vassar Instructor in sociology at Vassar College. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1965 ### The paper that published the word Presents Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate at the ACM 20th National Conference (proceedings pp. 84-100, doi 10.1145/800197.806036). The first printed use of hypertext, and the paper that introduced zippered lists. Source: [Wikipedia, Hypertext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext). - 1966-67 ### The name Xanadu The project takes its name from Coleridge's Kubla Khan (Wikipedia's two articles date the naming to 1966 and 1967). Source: [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). - 1967 ### The Hypertext Editing System at Brown Consults with Andries van Dam's group at Brown University on HES, the Hypertext Editing System, which ran on an IBM 2250 display with a light pen. Its successor was FRESS. Source: [Wikipedia, Hypertext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext). - 1968-69 ### Bell Labs and CBS Hypertext-related research at Bell Labs and interactive slideshow work at CBS Laboratories. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1972 ### The first demonstration runs out of money Cal Daniels completes a first demonstration version of Xanadu on a rented Data General Nova; the rental has to be returned for lack of funds. Source: [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). - 1974 ### Computer Lib/Dream Machines Self-publishes the two-front-covered book with about $2,000 of his own money, a print run of a few hundred copies, and the slogan You can and must understand computers NOW. Computer Lib is the political half; Dream Machines is the hypermedia half. He coins intertwingularity and cybercrud in it. Howard Rheingold later calls it the best-selling underground manifesto of the microcomputer revolution. Source: [Wikipedia, Computer Lib/Dream Machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines). - 1976-80 ### The itty bitty machine company Co-founds and serves as advertising director of the itty bitty machine company (its initials, ibm, were the joke) in Evanston, Illinois, an early personal-computer store. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1977 ### The Home Computer Revolution Publishes The Home Computer Revolution and spends a year as visiting lecturer in computing at Swarthmore. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1979 ### Tumblers at Swarthmore A summer gathering at Swarthmore brings in Roger Gregory, Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene. Miller and Gregory devise tumblers, the transfinite addressing scheme that lets Xanadu name any span of any version of any document. Source: [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). - 1980-81 ### Editing Creative Computing Editor at Creative Computing magazine. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1981 ### Literary Machines Publishes Literary Machines through his Mindful Press (first edition typewritten; nine editions to 93.1). It defines hypertext as non-sequential writing, names transclusion, and lays out the Xanadu design and its docuverse. Tim Berners-Lee's 1992 CERN pages call it essential reading. Source: [Wikipedia, Literary Machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Machines). - 1981-84 ### Datapoint, and the idea for ZigZag Chief software designer, then media specialist and technical writer, at Datapoint in San Antonio, Texas. Conceives ZigZag there in 1981. Source: [Wikipedia, ZigZag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)). - 1987 ### Computer Lib, revised Tempus Books of Microsoft Press issues a revised Computer Lib/Dream Machines, with a foreword by Stewart Brand. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1988 ### Autodesk backs Xanadu After meeting Autodesk founder John Walker at the Hackers Conference (Wikipedia says 1983; the first Hackers Conference was in 1984), Autodesk acquires the Xanadu technology in 1988. Nelson becomes a Distinguished Fellow at Autodesk. Source: [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). - 1992 ### Autodesk lets go; Marlene Mallicoat joins In August Autodesk divests the Xanadu Operating Company; lead programmers Mark Miller, Dean Tribble and Ravi Pandya go to Charles S. Smith's Memex. The same year Marlene Mallicoat, a former IBM software designer, becomes his collaborator and later his wife; she died in 2015. Source: [Marlene Mallicoat's obituary, 2015](https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?pid=174972671). - 1995 ### The Curse of Xanadu Gary Wolf's Wired article calls Xanadu the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. Nelson publishes a rebuttal on his site and, in 2019, a feature-length video reply, The Jackal's Curse. Source: [Wired, June 1995](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/). - 1995-96 ### Sapporo HyperLab Visiting professor of media and information science at Hokkaido University, running the Sapporo HyperLab. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1996-2002 ### Keio Visiting professor at Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa Campus, with further visiting professorships at Southampton and Nottingham. Publishes The Future of Information (ASCII Corporation, Tokyo, 1997). Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1998 ### Yuri Rubinsky award; Udanax Receives the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award at the Seventh World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane. The Xanadu source code is released as Project Udanax (1998 per Wikipedia; the Udanax site itself gives 1999). Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 1999 ### ZigZag demonstrated Team Zigzag (Edward Betts, Ted Nelson, Marlene Mallicoat, Art Medlar, Andrew Pam, Jeffrey Ventrella) shows a working ZigZag prototype in November; Andrew Pam had written the first prototype in Perl in 1997. Source: [Wikipedia, ZigZag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)). - 2001 ### Officier des Arts et Lettres Made an Officier des Arts et Lettres by France. US Patent 6,262,736 for ZigZag's interactive connection system is issued on 17 July. Source: [Oxford Internet Institute](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/ted-nelson/). - 2002 ### Ph.D. from Keio Doctor of Philosophy in Media and Governance, Keio University. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 2004-08 ### Oxford Internet Institute Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute (March 2004 to January 2006) with a visiting fellowship at Wadham College, then Visiting Research Fellow to October 2008. The OII calls him a systems humanist. Source: [Oxford Internet Institute](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/ted-nelson/). - 2007 ### XanaduSpace; seventy XanaduSpace 1.0, a viewer for parallel documents with visible connections, is released. Southampton marks his 70th birthday with an invited lecture. Source: [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). - 2008 ### Geeks Bearing Gifts Publishes Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way (Mindful Press, 199 pages). Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 2010 ### Possiplex, launched at the Internet Archive Publishes his autobiography POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization and launches it at the Internet Archive on 8 October, reading for two hours, demonstrating Xanadu and screening his 1959 film. Source: [Internet Archive blog, 2010](https://blog.archive.org/2010/10/15/ted-nelson-launches-his-autobiography-at-internet-archive/). - 2012 ### Computers for Cynics Begins the Computers for Cynics series on his YouTube channel: the myth of technology, files and directories, Xerox PARC, the database mess, Apple and Microsoft, hyperhistory, the real story of the World Wide Web. Source: [his home page](https://hyperland.com/). - 2013 ### A eulogy for Engelbart; Homebrew Delivers a eulogy for Douglas Engelbart at the Computer History Museum in December, which his home page calls his best writing ever. Featured speaker at the Homebrew Computer Club reunion in November. Source: [his home page](https://hyperland.com/). - 2014 ### OpenXanadu, SIGCHI, Chapman OpenXanadu is released as a working deliverable, 54 years after the project began. ACM SIGCHI gives him its Special Recognition Award. Chapman University confers an honorary Doctor of Science at Intertwingled, a conference on his work with speakers including Steve Wozniak and Wendy Hall. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 2015 ### Intertwingled, the book Springer publishes Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson, edited by Douglas Dechow and Daniele Struppa. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 2016 ### Lo and Behold Werner Herzog interviews him for Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. Source: [Wikipedia, Project Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). - 2017 ### Eighty, at the Internet Archive Gives an 80th-birthday presentation at the Internet Archive. The Archive begins digitizing Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons, the direct-mail advertising he collected from the 1960s to the mid-2000s. Source: [Wikipedia, Ted Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson). - 2018 ### Where My Ideas Came From Writes Where My Ideas Came From-- for Brewster, an essay for Brewster Kahle on Bush, Coleridge and the 1960 Harvard project, posted to the Internet Archive. Source: [his 2018 essay for Brewster Kahle](https://archive.org/details/HTbrewD11). - 2019- ### Still at it Publishes The Jackal's Curse, teaches at Chapman and UC Santa Cruz, and keeps xanadu.com and his channel going. Still hoping, in his words, for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard. Source: [xanadu.com](https://xanadu.com/). Discrepancies left as found: the Harvard M.A. is 1963 on his own page and 1962 on Wikipedia; the naming of Xanadu is 1966 in one Wikipedia article and 1967 in another; Wikipedia dates his meeting John Walker to 1983 at the Hackers Conference, which first met in 1984; the Udanax release is 1998 or 1999 depending on the source. ## Two artists for parents He was raised mostly by his grandparents, but the show-business inheritance shows: a musical at twenty, a film at twenty-two, a book with two front covers, a YouTube channel of eighty videos. Celeste Holm, 1947, the year of her Academy Award for Gentleman's Agreement. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons. Ralph Nelson, 1973. Emmy 1957 for Requiem for a Heavyweight; directed Lilies of the Field and Charly. Photo: RBNRP, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. ## The places Parrish Hall, Swarthmore College: his B.A. in 1959, a visiting lectureship in 1977, and the 1979 summer that produced tumblers. Photo: Kungming2 (CC BY 3.0), Wikimedia Commons. The Hypertext Editing System console at Brown, 1969. He consulted on HES with Andries van Dam in 1967. Photo: Gregory Lloyd (CC BY 2.0), Wikimedia Commons. Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa Campus: visiting professor from 1996, Ph.D. in 2002. Photo: Karadameguricha (CC BY-SA 3.0), Wikimedia Commons. The Oxford Internet Institute, where he was a Fellow from 2004 to 2006 and a Visiting Research Fellow to 2008. Photo: Abullard (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikimedia Commons. --- An independent fan and tribute site celebrating the work of Ted Nelson. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or the official site of Ted Nelson or Project Xanadu. His real sites are xanadu.com and hyperland.com.