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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
Tell
Good
Computers
Classroom
Computer
News

More quotes by 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, 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.
Ted Nelson
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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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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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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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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
Ted Nelson
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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
Ted Nelson
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
Ted Nelson
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
Ted Nelson
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Let me introduce the word 'hypertext' to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.
Ted Nelson
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
Ted Nelson
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Making things easy is hard.
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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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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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
Ted Nelson
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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.
Ted Nelson