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
Users
Seconds
Interface
Ten
Beginner
Internet
Interfaces
Within
Beginners
Simple
User
Understand
Emergency
Emergencies

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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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 Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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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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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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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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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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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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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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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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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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