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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Write
Anything
Writing
Always
Things
Frustrated
Cutting

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.
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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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 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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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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 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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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 purpose of computers is human freedom.
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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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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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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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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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