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.
From Ted Nelson
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, 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.
Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean 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.
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.
I thought I was going to be a filmmaker but at the same time I was an intellectual and I felt that I could make a contribution to some field, as yet, not invented.
I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.
In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.
Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives