Quote

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.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Trying
Seemed
Like
Obvious
Notion
Wriggling
Arms
Hypertext
Already
Footnotes
Struggle
Struggling
Free
Immediately
Ideas
Cat

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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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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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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'.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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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 technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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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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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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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Making things easy is hard.
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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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