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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.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Technology
Conventions
Term
Objective
Sound
Objectives
Ideas
Acceptance
Long
Sounds
Really
Bunch
Alarmed
People
Turned
Inexorable
Computer
Packages

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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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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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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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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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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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 Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
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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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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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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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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 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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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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