Transquoting
February 10th, 2005” It never occurred to me that the techies writing the software would try to use the computer to simulate paper � actually not even paper, but paper under glass. ” quoted in Grand Text Auto blog
Ted Nelson suffered character assasination in a well known Wired article about Xanadu. Anyone who can dismiss Word / MS Xp as a Paper Simulator is fine in my book. When you think about it, modern PCs and application software do spend a lot of time emulating paper! I have always preferred MS Excel’s tabbed worksheets as an interface to Word’s Kerouac like scrolling teletype roll.
The image above is quite deliberately deep-linked to a server that Nelson has specified as a ‘Transquoting’ source. Nice idea, but alas the official server is dead, so I cheated and linked to a server that really does have the picture.
Ted Nelson’s four maxims…
- most people are fools
- most authority is malignant
- God does not exist
- and everything is wrong