Ted Nelson Quotes

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.

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

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.

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We live in media, as fish live in water.

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

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.

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.

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

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

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.

You can and must understand computers now.

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.

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

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.

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

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.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

Making things easy is hard.

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