Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson was the first person to imagine interactive computer media and world-wide publishing among computer screens, both in 1960.  His Project Xanadu, founded in 1960, anticipated the World Wide Web.  He also invented the Back Button.

Nelson was originally a “media guy”.  By the time he got out of college, Nelson had won prizes for poetry and playwriting, published his own magazine, written the first rock musical and shot a half-hour film comedy.  But when in graduate school he learned how computers worked, he immediately saw them as the interactive and communication medium of the future.  He began planning to build a personal computer industry (roughly what Steve Jobs eventually did) and a world-wide hypertext system (roughly what Tim Berners-Lee eventually did), but too early and without support.  In the long run, Nelson’s main work has been the development of a radically different kind of electronic document– parallel and visibly connected sideways—that he believes we still desperately need.

Nelson says that his religion is “human creativity and human freedom.”