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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
Sound
Objectives
Ideas
Acceptance
Long
Sounds
Really
Bunch
Alarmed
People
Turned
Inexorable
Computer
Packages
Technology
Conventions
Term
Objective

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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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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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Making things easy is hard.
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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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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
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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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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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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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