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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
Deal
Deals
Numbers
Information
Arbitrary
Saying
Computers
Kind
Nonsense
Absolutely
Computer
More quotes by Ted Nelson
Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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Making things easy is hard.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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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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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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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