Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelsonis an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms transclusion, virtuality, and intertwingularity...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth17 June 1937
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
vision matter unifying
The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.
struggle cat ideas
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.
mean paper body
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.
news computer classroom
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.
believe games garbage-cans
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.
technology fool use
Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
computer wave display
If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.
writing design program
Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry