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

Ted Nelson, a pioneer of hypertext and the Xanadu project, repeatedly argued from the 1960s onward that computers should be understood as general-purpose media machines rather than mere calculators. In the early era of commercial computing, popular and institutional rhetoric often framed computers primarily as number-crunchers for business, science, and accounting. Nelson pushed back against this reduction, emphasizing that digital systems can represent and manipulate symbols, text, images, and other forms of information. The remark reflects his broader campaign to reimagine computing as a tool for writing, linking, publishing, and human thought—an outlook that helped shape later conceptions of personal computing and networked documents.

Nelson’s point is that computation is not essentially about arithmetic; it is about formal manipulation of representations. Numbers are just one convenient encoding among many. By calling the “computers deal with numbers” view “nonsense,” he challenges a culturally entrenched metaphor that narrows what people think computers are for. The quote underscores a media-theory insight: once information is digitized, diverse content types become transformable, storable, and linkable within the same system. This reframing supports Nelson’s lifelong emphasis on hypertext—documents as interconnected structures—because it treats text and other symbolic materials as first-class computational objects rather than secondary to numerical calculation.