Quotes from Ted Nelson

The paperless office is possible, but not by imitating paper. Note that the horseless carriage did not work by imitating horses.

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.

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.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

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.

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.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

You can and must understand computers now.

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.