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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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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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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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Making things easy is hard.
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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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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.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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, 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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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
Ted Nelson