[scottLobster]

Well as far as his outlook is concerned I wouldn't call it healthy simply due to his bitterness. While he may have fallen short of towering objectives, the vast majority of people go through life never achieving his level of influence. I would think he should be more grateful for the role he was able to play. It may not have been the part he wanted but at least he got to be on the stage.

As for why he has a fanbase, having never heard of Ted Nelson before this video I'd say it's because whether he was the absolute "first" or not he was clearly very early to the party and his intuition correctly led him to many of the technical paradigms we now use daily. For someone to track so closely to the march of progress implies there's something worth listening to. Perhaps some pattern to his beliefs or behavior that might help point toward where things are going.

Speaking of patterns, I can't help but notice that his repeating problem is one afflicting many academics: lack of practicality. He mentions this to a degree in his retrospective where he admits he "stuck to his guns" instead of jumping on the next big thing because he thought, sometimes rightfully, that his designs were "better". The problem there is he was using his definition of "better", not the market's. For someone who wanted his own company he seems to have made little study of the act of actually running one.

He also mentions his desire from an early age to be a "generalist great intellectual", and looked down on his friends/colleagues for specializing after college. Even at the end of the video he mentions he's "not a programmer, but a director/producer of programmers". He's also clearly a zealous idealist. All of this reflects a mind perfectly geared to creating great new systems and paradigms that are truly revolutionary.. and absolutely horrible at fitting them into existing systems, or of convincing the unenlightened to adopt them.

Why do many systems of the internet emulate paper when they are capable of so much more? (A notion he brings up and sneers at in disgust) Because people who never used the internet and knew crap about technology knew paper. That was their bridge, conscious or subconscious, to understanding the internet. He seems to greatly overestimate the intellectual rigor present in the average person. For all his foresight, I wonder if he foresaw people leaving voicemail to let their coworkers know they had just send them email. That was actually a thing in the 90s...

[revelation]

This paper thing sure stuck with him, then you see this video of him demoing what is less than a demo on some XP:

https://youtu.be/1yLNGUeHapA?t=3m16s

And it's fricking A4 paper in a black 3D void that they call "XanaduSpace". I mean, let's just stop here. Who are we ever going to call a crank if not this guy?

Apparently he has been claiming to be original HyperText inventor all the way back to 1965. He's like that guy claiming he invented email.

[scottLobster]

I see nothing wrong with that demo, in fact it's probably as revolutionary as he thinks. It effectively makes bibliographies obsolete and eliminates the overheard in tracking down sources. Add in his idea of micro-payments for quotations and you have viable financial incentive for people to publish work to Xanadu space. The whole 3D-space thing is a bit gimmicky, but could be useful in some contexts. It'd be great for academics/wikipedia/people who give a shit.

The idea of enabling branching knowledge paths for everything from media to education is also intriguing.

The issue when it comes to mass adoption is that most people don't give a shit. You need only look at comments on any news site to see the vast swath of people who read the headline and nothing else. They won't read the article, let alone care about sources, no matter how easy they are to track down, although Xanadu would seem to lessen the possible excuses.

There's also the issue that people are used to "free" ad-supported content, micropayments have yet to catch on even when offered. I'm still the only person I know who's even heard of Google Contributor.

And it's quite possible he was the first to come up with the concept of HyperText. He never claimed to have coded HTTP, merely to have invented the concept. True or not, he was clearly there on the ground floor. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Whether he was the first or not doesn't really matter anyway, I'm more interested in his ideas and practices than his historical claims.