Quotes by Ted Nelson

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.”

“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 disorderlynes...”

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

“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.”

“[Of the web] It's massively successful. It is trivially simple. Massively successful like karaoke - anybody can do it.”

“After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim Berners-Lee!”

“We should not impose regularity where it does not exist.”

“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...”

“You can and must understand computers now!”

“Everything is deeply intertwingled.”

“It is imperative for many reasons that the appalling gap between public and computer insider be closed. As the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals. Guardianship of the comp...”

“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 i...”

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

“In order for something to Catch On, it has to be standardized. Unfortunately, there is motivation for different companies to make their own little changes in order to restrict users to their own pr...”

“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 s...”