Nelson's Xanadu System

Ted Nelson envisioned a global library of information organized as hypertext. Since the 1970s Nelson's career has centered aroung his Xanadu project. Nelson's Xanadu is a theoretical computer system for interactive electronic publishing. It is a global multimedia system, with an extensive hypertextual organization for electronic publishing of literary and artistic works. The technology at the time was unable to support Nelson's theory. However, in 1981 Nelson developed a universal network server that would support a centralized hypertext database. Nelson's ideas were realized in 1991 with the introduction of the World Wide Web.