The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.