Ted Nelson Quotes
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A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.
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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.
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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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If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Making things easy is hard.
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After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim Berners-Lee!
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How is MS-DOS like MSG? Both raise your blood pressure and give you a tightening sensation around your forehead.
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The paperless office is possible, but not by imitating paper. Note that the horseless carriage did not work by imitating horses.
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Everything is deeply intertwingled.
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Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
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You can and must understand computers now!
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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'.
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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.
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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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We live in media, as fish live in water.
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Of the web It's massively successful. It is trivially simple. Massively successful like karaoke - anybody can do it.
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The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
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Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
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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.