Quote

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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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Saying
Computers
Kind
Nonsense
Absolutely
Computer
Deal
Deals
Numbers
Information
Arbitrary

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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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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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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.
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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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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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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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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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.
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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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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.
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Making things easy is hard.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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