Hypermedia

Hypermedia emerged as a concept in 1965 when Ted Nelson coined the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' in a paper for the ACM national conference—but the vision traced back to Vannevar Bush's 1945 article 'As We May Think,' which described the Memex, a hypothetical device for storing and linking personal records through associative trails. Nelson transformed Bush's analog vision into a digital architecture that would ultimately shape the World Wide Web.

Ted Nelson (born 1937) was not a computer scientist by training but a philosopher of information—someone who approached computing from the perspective of human thought rather than machine efficiency. During his time at Harvard, he envisioned a computer-based writing system that would provide a lasting repository for the world's knowledge while permitting flexibility in drawing connections between ideas. In 1960, he founded Project Xanadu to realize this vision.

Nelson's key insight was that 'everything is deeply intertwingled'—that knowledge doesn't exist in isolated documents but in webs of connection. He envisioned systems where documents could interconnect dynamically. Unlike the one-way links of the later World Wide Web, Xanadu's links were bidirectional: each node would know what other nodes linked to it. This would preserve context and prevent the broken links that plague today's web.

The first working hypertext system emerged in 1967 when Nelson worked with Andries van Dam at Brown University to create the Hypertext Editing System (HES). This was the world's first operational hypertext system, demonstrating that Nelson's concepts could be implemented on real computers. The system ran on an IBM System/360 and was later purchased by NASA for documentation of the Apollo program.

Project Xanadu aimed for features far more ambitious than what the web eventually delivered: transclusive linking that allowed visible connections between documents, versioning to preserve originals, and micropayments for content reuse. These features proved too complex for the 1960s hardware and remained perpetually unfinished. In 2014, fifty-four years after its founding, a partial demonstration finally went online.

Nelson's vision was bypassed by Tim Berners-Lee's simpler World Wide Web (1989), which used one-way links that could break without warning. This pragmatic trade-off enabled rapid adoption but sacrificed the bidirectional linking Nelson considered essential. The web we have is simpler than Xanadu—and perhaps lesser for it.

The cascade from hypermedia reshaped human knowledge. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia in history, built on hypertext principles. Academic citation networks went digital. Social media created new forms of interconnected content. Every time you click a link, you're using technology that Ted Nelson named in 1965, even if the implementation differs from his vision.