Machine That Changed the World: Interview with Ted Nelson (1990)

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31 points·karlicoss··5 comments

Nelson is a good example to keep in mind of the headwinds against "Crazy New Ideas" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27061789 on the front page now). Be one of the first in the world with a historically great idea, bet your career on it, and you still may not end up with much credit. (I'm not claiming he deserves all of the credit.)

http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an... gives a taste of what it was like before the web to try to explain the potential.

I actually happened to get a personal demo of Xanadu from Ted himself a few years ago. While it has some clever ideas and clearly was ahead of its time, they weren't really able to execute on them in a reasonable timeframe. The web won because it shipped.

One of the most important half-a-dozen living figures in the world of computing, and almost totally unrecognised.

He deserves more respect.

Almost no one remembers Gary Kildall, either. Yet no computer (or for that matter, compiler) would be recognizable if not for his achievements.

Pretty much true -- but Dr Kildall's company was huge in its time, its product dominated the infant PC industry, and of course dictated the design of MS-DOS 1.x. His influence was great. Nelson's work _inspired_ the biggest technological development of the last 30 years, but it never shipped, and what we got is a pale shadow of his idea.

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