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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
Poetry
Type
Design
Interactive
Learning
Designing
Writing
Programming
Software
Touch
Program

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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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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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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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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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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Making things easy is hard.
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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.
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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 nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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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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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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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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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
Ted Nelson