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Ted Nelson

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Overview

Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher of computer science, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his profile published in Forbes in 1997, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“[Of the web] It's massively successful. It is trivially simple. Massively successful like karaoke - anybody can do it.”
— BBC News Interview, "Visionary lays into the web" (2001)
“After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim Berners-Lee!”
— Article on Nelson's website, "Indirect Documents at Last!" (2005)
“I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ — it sounds so objective and inexorable — when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.”
— Quoted in In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates by John Markoff, published January 10, 2009 in the New York Times, page BU4 of the New York edition.
“You can and must understand computers now!”
— Slogan. (The insistence that ordinary people need to understand computers is remarkable for its era: the first personal computers were not available until 1975.)
“If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.”
— Dream Machines, p 22.
“Everybody has only a 24-hour day. Most people, if they increase consumption of one medium (like magazines or books) will cut down on another (like TV). This drastically reduces the sort of growth some people have been expecting.”
— Dream Machines

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.