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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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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Writing
Programming
Software
Touch
Program
Poetry
Type
Design
Interactive
Learning
Designing

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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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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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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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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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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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