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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

Ted Nelson

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Ted Nelson
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: June 17
Philosopher
Sociologist
Teacher
Paris
France
Theodor Holm Nelson
Nitwit
Computers
Computer
Understand
Many

More quotes by Ted Nelson

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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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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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The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.
Ted Nelson