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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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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Microsoft
Crew
Gates
Bill
Database
Bills
Databases
Decided
Oracle
Word
Oracles
Larry

More quotes by 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 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.
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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 Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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
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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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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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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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Making things easy is hard.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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.
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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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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