Ted Nelson Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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, 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?”

“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.”

“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.”