What Is Ted Nelson?

Ted Nelson is the man who invented hypertext. He's also the father of the random slogan, "What you see is what you get. " Nelson began his career as a computer programmer, but he soon became interested in how computers could help people communicate better. So in 1960, he started working on a project that would let users link text documents together with links. It was called Xanadu, designed to make it possible for anyone to link up any media file or text excerpt with any other file or section. This meant that people could copy content from anywhere and paste it into their work and when they did so, they'd be able to see where else that content had been used online. Xanadu never took off (though some think it will be one day). But Nelson went on to develop other concepts important for today's web. He coined the term "hypertext" and helped create Project Xanadu (which still exists today). The world was not yet ready for hypertext. In the 1960s, Ted Nelson, a young computer programmer, began working on a system that allowed people to link documents and ideas across vast distances. He called it Project Xanadu. Nelson had big plans for this new way of organizing information: he wanted authors to make money when their work was copied and used elsewhere. But his idea required micropayments which were yet to be possible, and even with those payments, he still needed to figure out how to verify who wrote what and where they could distribute their work legally. So Nelson set out to build an entirely new operating system from scratch that would run on computers that didn't yet exist. The result was an unbelievable project that rambled on for decades through multiple owners (including Nelson himself), gaining funding and losing funding until Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web. That wasn't the end for Project Xanadu, though: it's still being developed today! Whether it will yield a premium web or continue to be an interesting "what if" side note remains to be seen.