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
Like
Obvious
Notion
Wriggling
Arms
Hypertext
Already
Footnotes
Struggle
Struggling
Free
Immediately
Ideas
Cat
Trying
Seemed

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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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I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.
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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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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Making things easy is hard.
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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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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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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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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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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 Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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