Quote

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Understand
Emergency
Emergencies
Users
Seconds
Interface
Ten
Beginner
Internet
Interfaces
Within
Beginners
Simple
User

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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 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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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 objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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Making things easy is hard.
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