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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.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Point
User
Everything
Operate
Much
Technical
Believe
Users
Like
Typical
People
View
Views
Harried
Looking
Smoothly

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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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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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 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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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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 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.
Ted Nelson
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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 technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
Ted Nelson
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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.
Ted Nelson
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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.
Ted Nelson
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
Ted Nelson
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
Ted Nelson