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The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
News
Tell
Good
Computers
Classroom
Computer

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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Everybody has only a 24-hour day. Most people, if they increase consumption of one medium (like magazines or books) will cut down on another (like TV). This drastically reduces the sort of growth some people have been expecting.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry
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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.
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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.
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I thought I was going to be a filmmaker but at the same time I was an intellectual and I felt that I could make a contribution to some field, as yet, not invented.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.
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I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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Making things easy is hard.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.
Ted Nelson