Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson is an American writer and information theorist who coined the words hypertext and hypermedia in the 1960s and has spent his life pursuing Project Xanadu — a vision of deeply linked, two-way, never-broken connections between documents. He took direct inspiration from Vannevar Bush's memex.

Xanadu was never fully realized, and Nelson is a famously sharp critic of the World Wide Web, which he regards as a flattened, lossy shadow of what hypertext could have been — links that break, run only one way, and forget their own history. Whether or not one agrees, his ideas still haunt the tools-for-thought tradition.