Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows. He has written an unfinished autobiography and produced an unfinished film. His houseboat in the San Francisco Bay is full of incomplete notes and unsigned letters. He founded a video-editing business, but has not yet seen it through to profitability. He has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper, file cards, and sticky notes.
All the children of Nelson's imagination do not have equal stature. Each is derived from the one, great, unfinished project for which he has finally achieved the fame he has pursued since his boyhood. During one of our many conversations, Nelson explained that he never succeeded as a filmmaker or businessman because "the first step to anything I ever wanted to do was Xanadu."...
As with everything else in his life, Nelson's conversation is controlled by his aversion to finishing. There are no full stops in the flow of his speech, only commas, dashes, ellipses.
"And I remember thinking about the particles in the water, but I thought of them as places, and how they would separate around my fingers and reconnect on the other side, and how this constant separation and reconnection and perpetual change into new arrangements was - "
Suddenly, the monologue stopped, and Nelson reached into his cache of equipment. He retrieved his own cassette recorder, tested it, and turned the microphone toward himself. "OK, I'm at The Spinnaker," he continued, "talking about the old hand-in-the-water story and how the sense of the separation and reconnection of the places in the water made such an impression on me, and how all the relationships were constantly changing - and you could hardly hold onto it - you could, you could not, you couldn't really visualize or express the myriad of relationships."
Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.