Ted Nelson

In a paper delivered at the annual conference of the Association of Computing Machinery in 1965, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext. Like Engelbart, Nelson was also greatly influenced by Bush's work. He envisioned a system called Xanadu where a world of information would be available to individual people. Once again the technology at the time was unable to support Nelson's vision.

Nelson envisioned Xanadu as world-wide network of computers with access to a database of all of the world's knowledge. Nelson spent much of his time in the 1970s and 1980s attempting to bring his system, Xanadu, to the market as a commercial system; it was very much a forerunner to today's Internet. Although neither Xanadu nor the WWW has reached the point that Nelson envisioned, the WWW has the potential to make the famed Xanadu a reality.