"They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind"
About this Quote
Nelson rejects the narrow, mid-century assumption that computers are merely number crunchers and insists they are engines for manipulating symbols. A bit pattern has no intrinsic meaning; it becomes a number, a letter, a note, or a pixel only through agreed conventions. That universality is the point. A computer can structure, transform, link, and present any kind of information humans can encode, from prose and diagrams to video and entire knowledge networks. Treating computers as calculators shrinks their cultural and cognitive potential to a technical niche.
The line comes from a lifelong argument Nelson waged in the 1960s and 70s, when mainframes were used for scientific computation and accounting, and when programming cultures prized batch processing and numeric efficiency. Against that backdrop, he coined hypertext and pursued Project Xanadu, envisioning a world of richly interlinked, versioned documents where citation, quotation, and provenance are built into the medium. He called the interwoven nature of ideas intertwingularity and argued that computing should mirror that complexity rather than force information into rigid files and directories.
Seeing computers as general information machines shifts design priorities. The focus becomes representation, addressability, and relationships among pieces of content, not just algorithms and throughput. It asks for interfaces that augment human thought and creative work, an ethos shared by Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay. The web, multimedia, and social platforms vindicate Nelsons position: modern computing is mostly about text, images, sound, and the links among them. Yet the shortcomings he decried remain visible in brittle URLs, lost context, and siloed data.
Nelsons claim is both descriptive and normative. Descriptive, because a universal machine can operate on any symbolic structure. Normative, because if computers deal with arbitrary information, designers owe users systems that respect meaning, structure, authorship, and context, not just pipelines that push numbers around.
The line comes from a lifelong argument Nelson waged in the 1960s and 70s, when mainframes were used for scientific computation and accounting, and when programming cultures prized batch processing and numeric efficiency. Against that backdrop, he coined hypertext and pursued Project Xanadu, envisioning a world of richly interlinked, versioned documents where citation, quotation, and provenance are built into the medium. He called the interwoven nature of ideas intertwingularity and argued that computing should mirror that complexity rather than force information into rigid files and directories.
Seeing computers as general information machines shifts design priorities. The focus becomes representation, addressability, and relationships among pieces of content, not just algorithms and throughput. It asks for interfaces that augment human thought and creative work, an ethos shared by Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay. The web, multimedia, and social platforms vindicate Nelsons position: modern computing is mostly about text, images, sound, and the links among them. Yet the shortcomings he decried remain visible in brittle URLs, lost context, and siloed data.
Nelsons claim is both descriptive and normative. Descriptive, because a universal machine can operate on any symbolic structure. Normative, because if computers deal with arbitrary information, designers owe users systems that respect meaning, structure, authorship, and context, not just pipelines that push numbers around.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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