Personalities-Part 2

Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics. The main thrust of his work has been to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people. His motto is:
A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. The effort is 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 flourish, for a variety of reasons which are disputed. Journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history, The Curse of Xanadu[1], on Nelson and his project in the June, 1995 issue of Wired magazine. Nelson expressed his disgust on his website[2], referring to Wolf as a "Gory Jackal", and threatened to sue him.

Nelson claims some aspects of his vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web. However, Nelson says he dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup, and regards Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his own work:

Ray Tomlinson
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (born 1941) is a programmer who implemented an email system in 1971. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPAnet (previously, mail could only be sent to others who used the same computer). To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user from their machine, which has been used in email addresses ever since.
The first email sent by him is not preserved and had content he describes as insignificant, something like "QWERTYUIOP". This is commonly misquoted as "The first e-mail was QWERTYUIOP"

At first, his email messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to a colleague he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on." [3]

He is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a long-time employee of BBN.

Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York, but his family soon moved to the small, unincorporated village of Vail Mills, New York. He attended the Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York where he participated in the co-op program with IBM. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer in 1963.

After graduating from RPI, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group and developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as the subject of his Master's thesis. He received a S.M. in Electrical Engineering degree in 1965.