Ted Nelson Quotes

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

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.

Making things easy is hard.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

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.

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

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.

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

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

We live in media, as fish live in water.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

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

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.

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

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

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

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.