About Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher of computer science, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his profile published in Forbes in 1997, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'." Nelson first conceived of what would become Project Xanadu in the early 1960s, with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. In 1976, Nelson co-founded and briefly served as the advertising director of the "itty bitty machine company", or "ibm", a small computer retail store that operated from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. In 1998, at the Seventh WWW Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Nelson was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.