Science & Tech Quote by Ted Nelson

Graduate school is supposed to be the slow burn: seminars, footnotes, professionalization. Ted Nelson’s “like lightning striking” cuts straight through that drudgery with the language of conversion. Not “I got interested,” not “I discovered a new tool,” but an involuntary flash - sudden, bodily, slightly dangerous. The misspelling (“lightening”) almost helps: it nudges the image away from polished memoir and toward the breathless immediacy of someone remembering the moment their life snapped onto a different track.

The specific intent is origin-story compression. Nelson isn’t describing a syllabus; he’s claiming a before-and-after. In one sentence, he positions computing not as a credential but as revelation, the kind that reorders your sense of what work is for. That matters because Nelson’s larger cultural footprint is built on visionary impatience with existing systems: he’s the hypertext pioneer who looked at linear documents and saw a needless constraint.

The subtext is also a quiet critique of academia’s pace. Graduate school often trains people to become caretakers of inherited knowledge; a “computer course” in the mid-century university environment could feel like an escape hatch into making new worlds rather than merely interpreting old ones. Context sharpens the charge: for someone coming up when computing was still rarefied and conceptually strange, the first encounter wasn’t “learning software,” it was encountering a new medium. Lightning is the right metaphor for a medium that promised instantaneous connection, nonlinearity, and the intoxicating sense that ideas could finally move at the speed of thought.