Ted Nelson
Person
Theodor Holm Nelson was born on 17 June 1937. While still a student, he began to imagine a computer-based writing system that would permanently store the world’s knowledge and let people connect ideas more freely.
He coined the word “hypertext” in 1963 and first used it in print in 1965, in the paper “Complex information processing”, written for an ACM conference. The idea of such a writing system also led to Project Xanadu, his plan for a computer network with a simple user interface.
In my articles
In my second brain series, Nelson is one of the pioneers whom Tiago Forte lists alongside Vannevar Bush, because they dreamt of technology that would enhance human intellect. He gave hypertext its name. The word means text connected by links, and note-taking today relies on those links.
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All entriesTiago Forte
Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs and the author of “Building a Second Brain” and “The PARA Method”. He popularised the term “second brain”.