Ted Nelson Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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.

The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.

You can and must understand computers now.

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

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.