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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Everything
Mean
Desktop
Hierarchical
Files
Computers
Computer

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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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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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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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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 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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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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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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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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