IT Legends: Technology's Most Pioneering and Innovative Heroes

Ted Nelson: The Visionary Who Invented Hypertext and Named It In 1960s, prior to the rise of the internet, a visionary technologist and philosopher by the name of Ted Nelson foresaw the possibility of navigating large bodies of information retrieved from electronic media. He proposed something he called "hypertext," a concept that would eventually blossom into our online world of interconnectedness and interdependency. In this article, we will take a look at Ted Nelson, the man behind the idea of hypertext and the implications of his work for the development of the internet. Ted Nelson began his career as a filmmaker and writer, and it was these skills that would drive his later work in applied technology and philosophy. In 1964, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) wherein he coined the term "hypertext," introducing the concept that multiple documents could be interconnected, allowing the user to jump easily between literally any t...

Tim Berners-Lee: The Father of The Web Who Linked The Globe What would life be like if we couldn’t access online information and content with the click of a button? No one can remember such a recent time, all thanks to the incredible innovations of Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee was the visionary and revolutionary scientist who is credited with revolutionizing communication and commerce as we know it today. Born on June 8, 1955 in London, England, Berners-Lee attended competent schools including The Queen's College, Oxford and attended the main library of Oxford every day when he was 7 or 8-years-old. It is here that he read Encyclopedia Britannica continuously and where he developed his lifelong obsession with technology. It is also highly likely that his world-altering curiosity and interests can be attributed to his parents. His father, a mathematics professor and his mother, a computer scientist--employed in the first commercial program at the University of Manchester-likely gav...