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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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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Represented
Written
Presented
Word
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Complexes
Hypertext
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Paper
More quotes by Ted Nelson
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.
Ted Nelson
The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
Ted Nelson
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.
Ted Nelson
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.
Ted Nelson
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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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
Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
Ted Nelson
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.
Ted Nelson
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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.
Ted Nelson
We live in media, as fish live in water.
Ted Nelson
The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.
Ted Nelson
Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
Ted Nelson
The purpose of computers is human freedom.
Ted Nelson
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.
Ted Nelson
