Sign in

Private company

Itty bitty machine company

American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist (born 1937)

Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) 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'."2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

See how the biggest companies compare on our leaderboards

Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) 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'."2

How it started

Early life and education

Nelson is the son of Emmy Award–winning director Ralph Nelson and 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.

Nelson earned a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959. Following a year of graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago, Nelson began graduate work in Social Relations, then a department at Harvard University, specializing in sociology, and ultimately earned a M.A in sociology from the Department of Social Relations in 1962. After Harvard, Nelson worked as a photographer and filmmaker for a year at John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute in Miami, Florida, where he briefly shared an office with Gregory Bateson. From 1964 to 1966, he was an instructor in sociology at Vassar College.

During college and graduate school, Nelson began to envision 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. This came to be known as Project Xanadu.

Much later in life, in 2002, Nelson obtained his PhD in media and governance from Keio University.

From Wikipedia’s article on Itty bitty machine company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

  1. 1
  2. 2