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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
Internet
Interfaces
Within
Beginners
Simple
User
Understand
Emergency
Emergencies
Users
Seconds
Interface
Ten
Beginner
More quotes by Ted Nelson
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
Ted Nelson
The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
Ted Nelson
They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
Ted Nelson
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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Making things easy is hard.
Ted Nelson
The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
Ted Nelson
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
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
So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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
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.
Ted Nelson
Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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
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
The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
Ted Nelson
The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
Ted Nelson
If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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.
Ted Nelson
