The approach to the circuits which evolved at MIT was to set about to make the circuits fast and then the computer simple.




Through our history, many of the ideas came from our customers.



But in general, the market wasn't asking for it. Market surveys came to the conclusion that people wanted exactly what they had. That's because that's all they'd ever seen.



You never can say for sure because somebody else might have done it first.

DKA: Is DEC more open with its information about machine design than other companies?

KO: Probably so, because of [our] academic background. But even more important, it takes a lot of discipline to get people to write. After you're finished with a job, it's very hard to write about you've done because you're ready to go on to something new. Getting people to write down all they know about the project they worked on takes discipline and effort.



The company changes consistently and regularly. The people we hired initially of course were not trained in computers. They came from all kinds of backgrounds. Musicologists was surprisingly popular.



The military is always several years behind in computers, and getting farther and farther behind. They're not in a position to lead the computer industry just because of the way they're organized.



I think the interesting thing to observe about computers and computer technology is that the most significant changes people don't notice. Things they worry about never become a problem. For example, the hand calculator really was a revolution. No one predicted it, no one worried about it. It sneaked up on us and suddenly we all have them, we all use them, and we never thought of it as revolution. It just sneaked up on us.



I tell our people when I'm asked to lecture, look at the old people you want to be like.



I used to think that computers could do no harm. But there are some things which do worry me. Some people study computers and don't learn anything else. Computers are just tools to do something; you better be expert in something and consider the computers the tool. The computers are fun and exciting but they're just tools, and we better make sure that we know something about what the computers are supposed to solve not just the computers.


Computers also produce an enormous amount of data and people get confused with that. Data is not information. That's been pointed out. You put the data in a form which is useful and you have some information. But a large amount of data isn't information. I think in business making graphs is a menace.




***********ken olsen

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/olsen.html#tc1

"The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography."

*************Bob Taylor


wikipedia

Files have names, and can be referred to throughout your comnputer. But a file may include pieces of data which do NOT have names, and CANNOT be referred to elsewhere. Sometimes this is what you want. But often you would like to be able to refer to the smaller units WITHOUT names, and often you wish you did not have to refer to the larger ones WITH names.

************ ted nelson

http://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html

In Unix, you can pretty much do anything. There are no "applications". You can run any program on any data, and if you don't like the results, throw them away. Computer liberation will mean empowering users to have this same kind of control.

********************** ted nelson


(cfr. Forth)

http://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html

A VIC 20 combined with Terminal Cartridge and VIC Modem was one of the only ways to use BBS services and pre-internet Information Services like CompuServe.

http://www.commodore.ca/products/vic20/commodore_vic-20.htm

for a new publishing system of the future, and it seemed manifest to me in 1960 that we would be reading and writing on computer screens that were interactive and all this would be fed by a vast feeder network of digital digitalia around the world, since we're going to be publishing in a system of this kind, what would be the reward structure, what would be the document structure, and what would be the most beneficial extension of literature as we knew it. To me literature is the great ideal here, not some engineer's notion of information retrieval.

----------ted nelson

http://web.archive.org/web/20041009214354/http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html

Links meant that literature no longer had to be sequential.



As Alan Kay pointed out, literature was the software of the era.


http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/14.html

Ted Nelson started his often lonely and always stubbornly unique intellectual journey when he first realized what they were trying to do to him in school. "I hated school all my life," he claims, "from the first grade through high school, unrelentingly and every minute. I have never known anyone who hated school as much as I did, although my assumption is that other dropouts do."

"The result is a seemingly anarchic pool of documents, true, but that's what literature has been anyhow . . . ," Nelson claims. "Its orderliness is not, as some would suppose, imposed by the computer or its administrators, but by something which arose long ago in the natural structure of literature, and which we are merely retaining."


If this all seems like a wild idea, that means you understand it.


http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/14.html

As far as I know, there is still not a Decent Writing System anywhere in the world, although several things now come close. It seems a shame that grown men and women have to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels looking for acorns, in search of the phrases and ideas they themselves have generated. The decent writing system, as I see it, will actually be much more: it will help us to create better things in a fraction of a time, but also keep track of everything in better and more subtle ways than we ever could before. […]

*****************************ted nelson

http://www.mprove.de/diplom/ht/tndm.html

ted nelson, one-liners

Imitating paper on a computer screen-- as almost all consumer applications presently do-- is like tearing the wings off a 747 and using it as a bus on the highway.

...the game of DOOM is far more realistic than anyone expected was possible, because the programmers skillfully used fast interaction and blur rather than high resolution.

Hypertext is not technology but Literature. Literature is the information that we package and safe (first just books and newspapes and magazines, now movies and recordings and CD-ROMs and what-all). The design of tomorrow's literature determines what the human race will be able to keep track of and understand. These are not issues to be left to "technologists".

Information always comes in packages (media bundles, called "documents" (and sometimes "titles")), and every such package has a point of view. Even a database has a point of view.


**********ted nelson

http://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html