Ted Nelson.

The term "hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson
United States of America.


Ted Nelson is best known for: coining terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," 1963 (first published 1965).

Theodor Holm Nelson, born 1937, obtained his BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College. In 1960, he was a masters student in sociology at Harvard. Shortly after enrolling in a computer course for the humanities, he was struck by a vision of what could be. For his term project, he attempted to devise a text-handling system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work easily. Considering that he was writing in Assembler language on a mainframe, in the days before "word processing" had been invented, it was not surprising that his attempt fell short of completion.

In 1965, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machineryin which he coined the term hypertext. Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book Literary Machines. Nelson's conception of hypertext is a rich one. Dream Machines describes hypergrams (branching pictures), hypermaps (with transparent overlays), and branching movies.

Hypertext is the presentation of information as a linked network of nodes which readers are free to navigate in a non-linear fashion. It allows for multiple authors, a blurring of the author and reader functions, extended works with diffuse boundaries, and multiple reading paths.