"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, 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."
Source: In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates by John Markoff, www.nytimes.com. January 10, 2009.
About the author
Ted Nelson
Computer Scientist
Ted Nelson is a pioneering computer scientist known for coining the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia', influencing the development of the internet.
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"Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry"
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
"I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media."
"Let me introduce the word 'hypertext' to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper."
"I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess."