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

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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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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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Making things easy is hard.
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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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 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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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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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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