Ted Nelson

1995.06.01 - Wired - The Curse of Xanadu
- "Nelson’s life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them"
- Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years.
- Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson’s quest for personal liberation. The inventor’s hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.
  - I had this same issue, and I found that Confluence really, really helped.
- Nelson has never catalogued his thousands of hours of audio- and videotape.
- Xanadu’s goals – a universal library, a global information index, and a computerized royalty system – were shared by many of the smartest programmers of the first hacker generation.
1997.10.02 - XML.com - Embedded Markup Considered Harmful
1999.01.29 - Xanadu.com.au - Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners