Agree 100% -- I couldn't have said it better! In my professional life, I have often met consultant types with super vague technical ideas that (surprise!) they were secretly working on implementing. They woudn't release anything because they fear being criticized. The GUI was a big deal and still is to this day. Xerox PARC did change the world. Ted Nelson? Not so much...
It's not about who did and who didn't change the world, but the fact that the people who did change the world are not above (some pretty ruthless) criticism.
Old man, bitter that Alan Key, Steve Jobs & Xerox PARC got more money & credit than he ever did. Who the hell cares about his gripes? The "legendary story" was generally corroborated by all parties involved.
Ted Nelson has yet to admit missing the boat by never being able to release anything in over 40 years. He is a super-consultant & inverse opposite of what Y&C stands for. A great visionary with zero implementation skill. Time to die.
If you'd like to read more inflammatory screeds from idealists who've never released anything, I highly recommend the blog of Stanislav Datsovskiy[1], in which he passionately elucidates the finer details of what might constitute a non-horrible operating system/programming environment[2].
> "I sometimes find myself wondering if the invention of the high-level compiler was a fundamental and grave (if perhaps inevitable) mistake, not unlike, say, leaded gasoline."[3]
As I gather, he's spent about the last five years or so trying to build a LISP machine from scratch on an FPGA.
(PS I see from your profile that you're an iOS dev too... I would think that anybody who writes Objective-C for a living would typically sustain an intense and burning hatred for the state of contemporary programming, and be otherwise eternally fascinated by any proposed alternatives. How do you do it?)
