Theodor Holm Nelson is a pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms "transclusion," "virtuality," and "intertwingularity." According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."

Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960, with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. The effort is documented in the books Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974), The Home Computer Revolution (1977), and *Literary Machines *(1981). In 1965, he presented the paper "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" at the ACM National Conference, in which he coined the term "hypertext". Much of his adult life has been devoted to working on Xanadu and advocating for it. Throughout his career, Nelson supported his work on the project through a variety of administrative, academic, and research positions and consultancies.

By 1976, Nelson had co-founded and briefly served as the advertising director of the "itty bitty machine company", or IBM; one of the few retail stores to sell the Apple I computer. In 1978, he had a significant impact upon IBM's thinking when he outlined his vision of the potential of personal computing to the team that three years later launched the IBM PC. As of 2011, Nelson was working on a new information structure, ZigZag, which is described on the Xanadu project website and also hosts two versions of the Xanadu code. He also developed XanaduSpace, a system for the exploration of connected parallel documents (an early version of this software may be freely downloaded).

In 2001, he was knighted by France as Officier des Arts et Lettres. In 2007, he celebrated his 70th birthday by giving an invited lecture at the University of Southhampton. In 2014, ACM SIGCHI honored him with a Special Recognition Award. [1]

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