Ted Nelson is considered a pioneer in the field of hypertext and digital publishing. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1965 and spent decades working on an ambitious distributed hypertext system called Project Xanadu. While Xanadu was never fully realized, Nelson's ideas around non-linear writing and linking influenced the development of the World Wide Web and other hypertext systems. He remains an influential thinker for his early visions of personal computing and networked multimedia environments.