American - Author | June 17, 1937 -
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.
Ted Nelson
GoodComputersYouBadGood News
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.
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They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
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So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
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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.
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Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
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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.
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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.
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I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.
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In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.
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Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
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So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
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