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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
Computers
Classroom
Computer
News
Tell
Good

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
Ted Nelson
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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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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.
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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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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.
Ted Nelson
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Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
Ted Nelson
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The point is that these decisions they've made are partly for your convenience and partly for theirs and partly out of stereotypes that they carry with them from the conventions of the computer field.
Ted Nelson
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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
Ted Nelson
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
Ted Nelson
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
Ted Nelson
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
Ted Nelson
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
Ted Nelson
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I have long been alarmed by people's sheeplike acceptance of the term 'computer technology' - it sounds so objective and inexorable - when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.
Ted Nelson
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
Ted Nelson
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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
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
Ted Nelson
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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
Ted Nelson
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Making things easy is hard.
Ted Nelson
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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
Ted Nelson