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Theodor Holm Nelson

Theodor Holm Nelson, designer and generalist, has been a software designer and theorist since 1960 and a software consultant since 1967. His principal design work includes Project Xanadu and xanalogical systems, the transcopyright system, and the theory of virtuality design. His industry positions include Harcourt Brace & World publishers, Creative Computing Magazine, Datapoint Corporation, and Autodesk, Inc.; his university positions include Vassar College, University of Illinois, Swarthmore College, Strathclyde University, and Keio University.

Mr. Nelson has written several books, the most recent being The Future of Information (1997), as well as numerous articles, lectures, and presentations. He is best known for discovering the hypertext concept and for coining various words which have become popular, such as "hypertext," "hypermedia," "cybercrud," "softcopy," "electronic visualization," "dildonics," "technoid," "docuverse," and "transclusion."

He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959 and an M.A. in Social Relations from Harvard in 1963.

Articles by this author

Embedded Markup Considered Harmful

Hypertext's founding father artfully lays out some opposition to the conventional wisdom that SGML and its derivatives, HTML and XML are good things.