The Discovery of Hypertext

Ted Nelson discovered the concept of hypertext, influencing several developers of the Internet, most notably Tim Berners-Lee.

Ted Nelson's mother was an actress, and his father was a director. He went to Swarthmore College in the late 1950's, where he became a film maker. He then went to graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1959, followed by Harvard University in 1960, where he took a course in computer programming using an IBM 7090 computer and began to think about writing a document management system to index and organize his collection of notes.

As he considered the design of this system, Nelson applied his experience as a filmmaker with the conception of complex motion picture effects, moving from one shot to another, and conceived of the idea of hypertext. He became profoundly convinced of the enormous value of such a system, and has been thinking and talking about it ever since.

The word "hypertext" was first coined by Nelson in 1963, and is first found in print in a college newspaper article about a lecture he gave called "Computers, Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word" in January, 1965.

Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book Literary Machines. His vision involved implementation of a "docuverse", where all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible by a link from anywhere else. Navigation through the information would be non-linear, depending on each individual's choice of links. This was more than text -- it was hypertext. The web realizes part of this vision, except that there are deletions, and some information is stored in more than one place.