Personal Life
Nelson is the son of Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and the Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm.
His parents' marriage was brief and he was mostly raised by his grandparents, first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village. He is of Norwegian and Swedish descent.
Nelson earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 1959. In 1960 he began graduate work at Harvard in philosophy. During college and graduate school, he envisioned a computer-based writing system that would provide a lasting repository for the world's knowledge and also permit greater flexibility of drawing connections between ideas. He later attributed this ambition, in part, to his need to track his disjointed mental activity brought about by attention deficit disorder.
The project became the overriding concern of his life. In 1965, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery in which he coined the term "hypertext".
Read more about this topic: Ted Nelson
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