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

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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Making things easy is hard.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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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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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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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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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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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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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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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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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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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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