Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson's contribution to the development of hypertext and hypermedia are profound, extending even to the coining of the terms hypertext and hypermedia. Since 1960, he has been developing a comprehensive paradigm for the implementation of a distributed hypermedia system that covered the full spectrum of issues; from the algorithms to the economics. The result of this paradigm is the ongoing Xanadu project.

The purpose of Xanadu is to establish Nelson's vision of the Docuverse. Docuverse is the term he coined to describe a global online library containing, in hypermedia format, all of humanity's literature. This concept of the Docuverse is on of the foundational paradigms of the WEB.

Amazingly, he had a prototype running in 1965. This prototype modeled many of the concepts that make up any hypermedia system, including the WEB.

While Xanadu has never been released as a product, the several key aspects of the comprehensive paradigm underlying it has been incorporated into the WEB. Anyone interested in learning more about Xanadu, and its paradigm should check out the Xanadu site. The site also has a complete bibliography of Nelson's work.

This description of Nelson's work is brief, as the concepts he pioneered are described in the Docuverse, hypertext, and hypermedia sections.

WEB Paradigm	Why.	Media Theory.	History and Prehistory	Print Paradigm.
Multimedia Paradigm.	Hypertext Paradigm.	Docuverse Paradigm.	Interactive Paradigm.	Conclusions