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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
Computers
Computer
Purpose
Freedom
Human
Humans

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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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 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 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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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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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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
Ted Nelson
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
Ted Nelson
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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.
Ted Nelson
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
Ted Nelson