[12]
“Theodor
Holm Nelson, born 1937, obtained his BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College.
In 1960, he was a masters student in sociology at Harvard. Shortly after
enroling in a computer course for the humanities, he was struck by a vision of
what could be. For his term project, he attempted to devise a text-handling
system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work easily.
Considering that he was writing in Assembler language on a mainframe, in the
days before "word processing" had been invented, it was not surprising
that his attempt fell short of completion. Five years later, he gave his first
paper at the annual conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
It was around this time that he coined the term hypertext. Since that
date, Nelson has been pursuing his dream, a software framework he named Xanadu,
after Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (he came up with the name while working
for a publisher). This he describes at length in Literary Machines,
calling it a magic place of literary memory.” (Retrieved
January 2, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0155.html)