Ted Nelson Quotes

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.

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 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.

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

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

We live in media, as fish live in water.

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

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

You can and must understand computers NOW.

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

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

The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

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.

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

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

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

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

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

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

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

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.