Ted Nelson Quotes

Ted Nelson — American Author

Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965.Rettberg, Jill Walker. "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate". Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice. Nelson coined the terms transclusion,virtuality, and intertwingularity (in Literary Machines} ... (wikipedia)

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