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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
Computer
Everything
Mean
Desktop
Hierarchical
Files
Computers

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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 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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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 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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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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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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 in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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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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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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Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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