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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
Computer
Purpose
Freedom
Human
Humans
Computers

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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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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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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Making things easy is hard.
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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 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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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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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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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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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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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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Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry
Ted Nelson