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The purpose of computers is human freedom.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Freedom
Human
Humans
Computers
Computer
Purpose

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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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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I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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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 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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Making things easy is hard.
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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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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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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 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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
Ted Nelson
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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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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
Ted Nelson