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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
Good
Computers
Classroom
Computer
News
Tell

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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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 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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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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.
Ted Nelson
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
Ted Nelson
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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