Ted Nelson
While studying Sociology at Harvard in the early 1960s — at that time the personal computer was not yet invented — Theodor Holm Nelson had the idea of the hypertext and of an electronic publishing world. He envisioned Xanadu, the place of the literary memory, where all texts are deeply cross-referenced, navigable and comparable and ever remain available, and described it at his work ”Literary Machines“ (first edition 1981, last edition 1993).
Ted Nelson has an alternative view on computer technology and plays a crictical role, he finds basic problems in the current software landscape. He considers Microsoft and Apple to go the same way restricting the computer to be a mere paper imitator, thus not making use of all its possibilities. He criticises the generalised missuse of the ”hierarchie.“ that constrains document organisation into an unnatural order. He points out the insufficient approach of the current file systems, being file contents unreachable by the operating system and owned by single applications, thus each application having its own data representation and integrating poorly with each other. Further it is now not possible to change file names without breaking all references, the first name one thing happens to get remains for ever.
Literary Machines
His book Literary Machines presents the vision of an electronic publishing world.
Some references
Ted Nelson On Software
In this short video (7 min., probably about 2007) he synthesizes his main critic points to the current software:
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Intertwingularity: When Ideas Collide
70th birthday Lecture at the University of Southampton (90 min. video), where he generalizes his critic to other subjects such as education and learning.
Ted Nelson: Intertwingularity. When Ideas collide
Xanadu
Overview of the Xanadu project at this article:
Ted Nelson: Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning and Deep Re-Use, 2007.
www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
The Future of Information
Theodor Holm Nelson: The Future of Information. Ideas, Connections and the Gods of Electronic Literature. First Edition, June 1997, Published by ASCII Corporation, Japan.
Quotation (Chapter One: Where to Begin?, page 3):
This book explains my proposed overall design for the media of the future. But first you should understand my general way of thinking. So there are interlocking essays about ideas, words, virtuality, media, and what computers are for.
Then we get to the consequences of this philosophy for how we should use computers: what tomorrow's media should — and I believe will — be like — especially transpublishing and transcopyright, transparallel visualization and hyper-sharing.
Geeks Bearing Gifts
Ted Nelson: Geeks Bearing Gifts, Dec. 2008, Mindful Press, distributed by lulu.com.
In this book for the general public Ted Nelson explains some key episodes in history of computing from the beginning until the present and his own point of view about it. He criticizes things such as the imposition of hierarchy, the object-oriented paradigm and XML. He shows that the current technology is by no means necessarily the way it is, but a product of many different fights and ideas by many people, companies and states. He presents also briefly his idea of how hypertext (electronic literature) should be.
Ted Nelson has set up a book's website including chapter summaries.
Ted Nelson's Bibliography
A rich reference list from writings and videos is included in Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces, Master’s Thesis by Matthias Müller-Prove.
Müller-Prove: Ted Nelson's Bibliography
