American information technologist who coined the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' (1963) and spent 50 years developing Project Xanadu — an idealized hypertext system with two-way links and automatic micropayment — whose concepts deeply influenced the World Wide Web (though the Web implemented them incompletely in his view).
Invented the conceptual vocabulary for the hyperlinked world — Nelson's 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' concepts (1963) predated the web by 30 years and described a world where all documents are interconnected; the Web is a simplified implementation of his vision, and he spent his career arguing the Web got it wrong by using one-way links.
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