InspiringQuotes

Ted Nelson Quotes:

Ted Nelson quotes

Ocupation: Philosopher

Life: b. June 17, 1937

Birthday: June 17

famous quotes

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Topics: Writing, Design, Program

quote learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning ted nelson Quotes

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

Topics: Technology, Fool, Use, Developers, Programming Funny

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.

Topics: News, Computer, Classroom, Bad News, Good News And Bad News

Right now you are a prisoner of each application you use. You have only the options that were given you by the developer of that application.

Topics: Use, Given, Prisoner, Developers

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

Topics: Numbers, Information, Arbitrary

The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.

Topics: Successful, Simple, Karaoke

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

Topics: Mean, Computer, Desktop

Telling computer guys that they need to have permission to quote things is like having to tell little children about Death.

Topics: Children, Guy, Littles

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.

Topics: Moving, Topics, Computer, Storage

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.

Topics: Intellectual, Fields, Filmmaker

I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.

Topics: Media, Kind, Concerned, New Media

Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.

Topics: Arms, Projects, Trademarks

So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?

Topics: Writing, Cutting, Frustrated

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.

Topics: Struggle, Cat, Ideas, Footnotes

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.

Topics: Records, Paper, Able

I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.

Topics: Numbers, Irrelevance, Groups, Social Worker, Rigidity

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.

source: - "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". Book by Ted Nelson, 1974.

Topics: Book, Cutting, People

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

Topics: Computer, Power Corrupts, Obsolete

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.

Topics: Bills, Databases, Oracles, Microsoft Word

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

source: - "Computer Lib". Book by Ted Nelson, p. 42 / Dream Machines p.45, 1974.

Topics: People, Emptiness, Pretending

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

Topics: Graduation, School, Years, Graduate School, Grad School

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

Topics: Graduation, School, Graduates, Graduate School

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.

source: - "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". Book by Ted Nelson, 1974.

Topics: Computer, Wave

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.

Topics: Believe, Views, People

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.

source: - Proceedings of the 20th National Conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (1965)

Topics: Mean, Body, Way, Interconnected

The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

Topics: Rights, Trying, Links

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

source: - "A different vision of the computer world". sydney.edu.au. April 4, 2011.

Topics: Simple, Emergencies, Beginners, User Interface

You can and must understand computers NOW.

Topics: Computer

Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.

Topics: Thinking, Nuts, People, Attention Deficit Disorder, Hummingbirds

What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes.

Topics: Numbers, World, Corny, World Wide Web, Browsers

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

source: - "The Curse Of Xanadu" by Gary Wolf, www.wired.com. June 01, 1995.

Topics: People, Fool, Doe

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

Topics: Purpose, Computer, Humans

The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there's a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.

Topics: Cutting, Ideas, Space

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.

Topics: Acceptance, Technology, Ideas

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.

Topics: Wall, Spring, Ideas, Four Walls

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.

Topics: Decision, Fields, Computer

Making things easy is hard.

Topics: Easy, Hard

The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.

Topics: Vision, Matter, Unifying, Technicalities

The World Wide Web is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT. We long ago foresaw the problems of one-way links, links that break (no guaranteed long-term publishing), no way to publish comments, no version management, no rights management.

source: - "Project Xanadu" description on Ted Nelson's Home Page, xanadu.com.au. November 17, 1998.

Topics: Rights, Trying, World, World Wide Web

We live in media, as fish live in water.

Topics: Media, Water, Fishes

History is fractal. The closer you look, the more complicated, yet always repeating patterns.

Topics: Looks, Patterns, Complicated, Fractals

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

Topics: Believe, Garbage Cans, Differences, Great Design

The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.

Topics: Views, Years, Defining, Techie

The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.

Topics: Morning, Simple, Friendly

How is MS-DOS like MSG? Both raise your blood pressure and give you a tightening sensation around your forehead.

Topics: Msg

The paperless office is possible, but not by imitating paper. Note that the horseless carriage did not work by imitating horses.

Topics: Paperless, Carriages

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