[mechanical_fish]

Yes, and as a result I'm afraid I find the whole joke rather uninteresting.

Historical irony is only fun if it's historical. Otherwise it's just fiction. It's easy to imagine a bunch of philistines who unfairly reject a piece of brilliant work. Indeed, plenty of academics imagine that every day. It's a cliché.

[tptacek]

Plus, the reviewer is right about Codd. ;)

[balloot]

Agreed. This reads to me like an attempt by a professor to show that his research being rejected makes him no different from all these other greats in the field. In reality, the vast majority of great papers are acknowledged as such soon after their release.

[mechanical_fish]

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that great papers are always recognized. There's a lot more variety than that.

Some great papers are recognized in manuscript. Some are hailed within the year of their publication. Some are rejected because the reviewer is an archrival of the chairman of the author's department. Some are rejected because the author is of the wrong religion or ethnic group. Some are published to moderate applause and then forgotten about for thirty years, at which point someone accidentally finds them and realizes that the authors were decades ahead of their time. Some would have been immediately given prizes if their authors were half as good at writing as they were at thinking. Some are recognized as interesting, but people with a vested interest in a different viewpoint try to pretend they're not interesting for as long as possible. Some are universally recognized as true but the authors are burnt at the stake anyway...

History is more interesting than fiction. Fiction which doesn't find an audience simply disappears, so it must generally be believable, and it must not make its audience too uncomfortable. History is under no such constraints.

[mikebike]

It's funny because it imagines what the reviews would be like if these papers were reviewed today. The object of ridicule is the current state of peer review in computer science.