“Project Xanadu, a 1960s hypertext vision and the industry’s
most delayed vapourware, is putting some of its code on the Web as
open source with an X11 licence. Ted Nelson, Xanadu’s guiding
light, invented the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 but
failed to develop a working system incorporating it. Despite this,
he and his ideas have had a seminal influence on the invention of
Lotus Notes (Ozzie Clark acknowledged inspiration from Nelson), and
indirectly on HTML and the Web.”
“It is probably best to consider Nelson’s xanological structure
to be just an abstract idea, rather like the Turing machine. He was
trying to develop a universal knowledge system with much greater
elegance, structure and stability than the Web.”