Quote

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

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Field
Computer
Stereotypes
Fields
Convenience
Decision
Stereotype
Point
Partly
Made
Conventions
Decisions
Carry

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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 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 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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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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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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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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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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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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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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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
Ted Nelson