Ted Nelson
[7] After Harvard, Nelson was 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.During college and graduate school, he 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.Throughout his career, Nelson supported his work on the project through a variety of administrative, academic and research positions and consultancies, including stints at Harcourt Brace and Company (a technology consultancy and assistantship where he met Douglas Engelbart, who later became a close friend; 1966-1967),[citation needed] Brown University (a tumultuous consultancy on the Nelson-inspired Hypertext Editing System and File Retrieval and Editing System with Swarthmore friend Andries van Dam's group; c. 1967-1969),[citation needed] Bell Labs (hypertext-related defense research; 1968-1969),[8] CBS Laboratories ("writing and photographing interactive slide shows for their AVS-10 instructional device"; 1968-1969),[8] the University of Illinois at Chicago (an interdisciplinary staff position; 1973-1976)[8] and Swarthmore College (visiting lecturer in computing; 1977).At the behest of Xanadu developers Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene, Nelson joined San Antonio, Texas-based Datapoint as chief software designer (1981–1982), remaining with the company as a media specialist and technical writer until its Asher Edelman-driven restructuring in 1984.As early as 1972, a demonstration iteration developed by Cal Daniels failed to reach fruition when Nelson was forced to return the project's rented Data General Nova minicomputer due to financial exigencies.Nelson has stated that some aspects of his vision are being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, but he dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup – regarding Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his original vision: HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.[2] In 1976, Nelson co-founded and briefly served as the advertising director of the "itty bitty machine company", or "ibm", a small computer retail store that operated from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois.[17] From the 1960s to the mid-2000s, Nelson built an extensive collection of direct advertising mail he received in his mailbox, mainly from companies selling products in IT, print/publishing, aerospace, and engineering.