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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

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

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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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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, 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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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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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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
Ted Nelson