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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
Thought
Going
Invented
Make
Filmmaker
Time
Contribution
Field
Fields
Intellectual
Felt

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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Making things easy is hard.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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
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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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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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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.
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.
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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