Happy Birthday, Ted
June 20, 2007
As one of the countless people who owe their livelihoods to Ted Nelson (whether they realize it or not), I'd like to wish the man a happy 70th birthday.
Without Nelson, there would be no Web as we know it. As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1960s, he started outlining his vision of a new kind of networked, human-centered computing environment that stood in brilliant opposition to the perfunctory number-crunching mindset of the early computer scientists. Nelson coined the term "hypertext" out of the blue, and wrote a series of far-sighted - if occasionally half-crazy - books and articles that paved the way for the present-day Web. Nelson took his inspiration from Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart, and his writing in turn inspired Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web.
Unfortunately, Nelson has been reduced to something of a caricature in recent years, thanks partly to Gary Wolf's influential hatchet job in Wired a few years ago, but also - it must be admitted - to Nelson's own eccentric personality. But all the good geniuses have always flirted with madness, and in my book Nelson qualifies as one of the authentic geniuses of this or any century.
I enjoyed a brief correspondence with Ted while I was working on my book last year, wherein he gently chided me for treating him like a "mummy in a museum" - relegating him to the status of historical figure when he's still actively working, writing and developing new tools like ZigZag. I'm happy to report that Dr. Nelson is alive and well and living at the Oxford Internet Institute, where I hope he keeps working for years to come.
> Ted Nelson's 70th Birthday Lecture (given a month before his birthday, for some reason). There's also a podcast available.
File under: Glut
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GLUT:
Mastering Information Through the Ages
New Paperback Edition
“A penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on the information age and its historical roots.”
—Los Angeles Times
