[ccera]

TL;DR: Grumpy, bitter man is grumpy and bitter.

I suppose Nelson deserves some credit for being a visionary, but there are two definitions for visionary in the dictionary: (1) A person with unusual powers of foresight; (2) A person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible.

Nelson is obviously much more the second than the first.

He's no more visionary than at least a thousand other people who ACTUALLY DID STUFF.

Some really smart individuals, like Nelson, get lost in their own private jungles. Here's an example of what I mean. Nelson inserted a note in this document in 2012 wherein he points to the rise of XPointer and XPath as validating something he said back in 1999. XPointer and XPath?! XPointer and XPath have had barely any impact on anything that's happened in computing since 1999.

Nelson is apparently in such a deep fog of irrelevance that he somehow perceives XPointer and XPath as being important in some way? It's bizarre. I think it illustrates why he never managed to accomplish anything or make any actual contributions beyond his "visionary" grenade-throwing.

[bachback]

Yes! You're almost half right! But more seriously TN is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. see my note above.

[ccera]

I am thoroughly familiar with Nelson. I've read probably a majority of everything he's ever written. He's a smart man and a visionary. As I stated.

Doesn't change the fact that he hasn't been very successful at turning his ideas into anything actually useful to people, and doesn't change the fact that he shits all over the amazing accomplishments of thousands of other people who have.

[bachback]

I'm talking about his impact on history, not necessarily the validity of his arguments in the year 2013. Almost all work in history morphs into something else. He influenced others who have build the computer industry a great deal as far as I can tell. For example if one wonders where Steve Jobs got so many great ideas in the early years it's probably in part due to Nelson, for example understanding computing as an expressive medium, as a replacement for paper. Clearly the work of Berners-Lee is directly influenced by Nelson. Unlike Gutenberg he didn't actually build the printing press. But he should be mentioned as a major contributor to the modern computer world. I very much doubt that "thousands of other people" can claim anywhere such things. According to wikipedia: "The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS)." So there are perhaps 5 or 10 people who are the first level input nodes for the web. Not "thousands". By this line of reasoning Bill Gates contributed more to the web, because the Internet Explorer was widely adopted.