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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.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Fields
Intellectual
Felt
Thought
Going
Invented
Make
Filmmaker
Time
Contribution
Field

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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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.
Ted Nelson
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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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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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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
Ted Nelson
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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'.
Ted Nelson
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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
Ted Nelson
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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Making things easy is hard.
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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.
Ted Nelson
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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.
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.
Ted Nelson
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
Ted Nelson
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
Ted Nelson
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
Ted Nelson
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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.
Ted Nelson
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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.
Ted Nelson