60 Quotes by Ted Nelson

…schools as we know them appear designed at every level to sabotage the supposed goals of education.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.