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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
Humans
Computers
Computer
Purpose
Freedom
Human

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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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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, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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, 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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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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 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 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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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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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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