Stanford Seminar: I forgot, I invented hypertext - Ted Nelson

Theodor Holm Nelson PhD
May 11, 2022

In 1968 and 1969 I commuted to Brown, at my own expense, and worked with programmer Steven Carmody to implement clickable span of text, as well as the Back Button. This was the HES system. (It differed from Engelbart's Jump command, which he had shown me in 1966, which required a typed command.) I will reminisce about this, and about Doug Engelbart, SRIs Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect, the “Mother of All Demos” and other historical events.

Ted Nelson has the bragging rights as the Original visionary of world wide hypertext, 1960.

Fighting for parallel pages, visibly connected.

#hypertext

[frankgreco]

Thanks for this. Very underrated thought-provoker. I attended Ted's Hypertext 1987 talk, where he coined the phrase "web surfing" in real-time. He was introduced by someone talking about the web being the next wave in computing. His first words were something like, "if the web is the next wave, we are all surfing that wave".

[Larrypress]

I also presented a paper (on a two-mainframe OS) at the 1965 ACM National Conference that Ted Nelson mentioned in his talk and coincidently we were in the same session. As I recall, he had a cardboard mock-up of a portable computer strapped on like a backpack and mainly clowned around. It was theater and goofy, but this was during the 60's so it was OK if atypical for the venue :-)

[christijennings]

If I could have asked a question here, I would have asked, how did the Xanadu System differ because its customer was not DARPA? How have the derivatives differed because of this civilian orientation?

[ConanXin]

泰德·尼尔森（Ted Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect）、"所有演示之母"（Mother of All Demos）和其他历史事件。

[HikikomoriDev]

...If Ted Nelson have had his way in this world, I think we wouldn't have been in the tremendous and disastrous troubles we are in today.

[egnqqtc]

Ted is that unfortunate genius that ended up stuck in the wrong timeline.