Ted Nelson came up with the idea in 1967 to develop Xanadu, a world-wide electronic publishing system that could serve as a sort of universal library, accessible to everyone. (Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is a similar-but-smaller-scale system.) Because he was seen as a radical and he wasn’t a trained technology professional, Nelson’s ideas were sometimes ignored. Computer hackers continued working on building the code for Xanadu over the decades. In 1999, the Xanadu code was made open-source. Nelson was known for coining the term “hypertext.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
