Life & Wisdom Quote by Ted Nelson

Nelson’s impatience here is doing a lot of work. He isn’t merely correcting a technical misunderstanding; he’s puncturing a worldview. In the mid-century popular imagination, computers were glorified calculators: sterile machines for payroll, ballistics, and actuarial chores. By calling that framing “absolutely nonsense,” Nelson signals that the real limitation wasn’t hardware, it was cultural: a failure of metaphor. If you think a computer “deals with numbers,” you’ll build systems that treat humans like accounting problems. If you recognize it “deals with arbitrary information,” you can imagine text, images, links, and ideas as first-class citizens.

The phrase “arbitrary information of any kind” is the tell. It’s not a dry definition of computation; it’s a manifesto for media. Nelson, who later coined “hypertext” and pushed the ambitious (and famously unruly) Project Xanadu, is arguing that the computer is a general-purpose symbol machine. Numbers are just one costume information wears when you need it to behave predictably.

There’s subtexted critique, too, of institutional gatekeepers: the engineers, managers, and pundits who domesticated computing into back-office efficiency. Nelson is insisting on a broader, messier future where computers are for writing, organizing, connecting, publishing - and, crucially, for reshaping how people think in networks rather than ledgers. The line lands because it’s both obvious and insurgent: once you accept it, the entire map of “what computers are for” has to be redrawn.