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Nelson is currently a visiting professor at Oxford University, and a philosopher who works in the fields of information, computers, and human-machine interfaces. He founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating such a system on a computer network, further documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. Much of his adult life has been devoted to working on Xanadu and advocating it.
The Xanadu project itself failed to take off, for a variety of reasons which are disputed. The American journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history of Nelson and Xanadu in 1995. Nelson expressed his disgust on his Web site and threatened to sue "Gory Jackal."
Some aspects of its vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web; the Web owes much of its inspiration to Xanadu.
Nelson dislikes the World Wide Web, the Internet, XML and all embedded markup, and regards Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his own work.
He is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag , information about which can be found off the Xanadu project home page, which also contains two versions of the Xanadu code.
In 2001 he was knighted by France as "Officier des Arts et Lettres". In 2004 he was appointed as a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and associated with the Oxford Internet Institute - where he is currently conducting his research.
He is the son of the Academy Award-winning actressAn actor is a person who acts, or plays a role in an artistic production. The term commonly refers to someone working in movies, television, live theatre, or radio, and can occasionally denote a street entertainer. Besides playing dramatic roles, actors m Celeste HolmCeleste Holm (born April 29, 1917) is an American stage, movie, and television actress. She is perhaps best remembered for her Oscar-winning role in Gentleman's Agreement ( 1947), as well as for her Oscar-nominated performance in All About Eve ( 1950)., and Emmy AwardThe Emmy Awards are United States television production awards, similar to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment. There are two types of Emmy Awards, the Daytime Awards and the Primetime Awards. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sci-winning directorA television director is usually responsible for directing the actors and other filmed aspects of a television production. In contrast to a film director, the major creative control will likely reside with the producer(s) of the show. The majority of tele Ralph NelsonRalph Nelson ( August 12, 1916 December 21, 1987) was an American movie and television director, producer, writer, and actor. He is best known for his direction of the 1968 movie Charly as well as several racially provocative films in the 1960s and early.
He earned a Bachelor's degreeA bachelor's degree is usually an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course that generally lasts three or four years. Note that some postgraduate degrees are entitled Bachelor of. the University of Oxford Bachelor of Civil Law. Honours degrees In in philosophyPhilosophy literally means 'love of wisdom' from the Greek 'philo' and 'sofia'. It is now widely used to designate the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters concerning life, death, meaning, reality, being and truth. The term may also re from Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the United States. Along with Williams, Amherst, Wellesley, Carleton, Pomona, and Bowdoin, Swarthmore is considered one of the top liberal arts colleges in the world. All of its 1,500 in 1959, a Master's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1963 and a Doctorate in Environmental Information from Keio University in 2002. In 1998 he was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.