Ted Nelson Quotes
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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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Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.
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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.
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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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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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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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.
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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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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.
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Telling computer guys that they need to have permission to quote things is like having to tell little children about Death.
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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.
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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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The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.
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I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.
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The purpose of computers is human freedom.
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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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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 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.
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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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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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History is fractal. The closer you look, the more complicated, yet always repeating patterns.
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Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.
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I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.