
Here I Stand, at Age 80 - tosh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-SGlGs
======
sktrdie
Although he's done a lot for the Computer Science field, his pretentiousness
is way over the top in this video and makes it less enjoyable to watch.

He could've outlined and explained his life story without saying "which I was
first at inventing" or "I'm always first" or "I invented all these things"
every 5 minutes.

Not to degrade his inventions of course - I would not care whether, say,
Einstein was pretentious; it's his output that mattered.

But it feels less authentic when you're constantly rubbing it in people's
faces.

------
kawera
Thanks for posting this. For those interested, I would also recommend Howard
Rheingold's video "Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart come to dinner" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-
HSJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc)

~~~
tosh
Ted's whole Youtube account is a treasure trove.

Incredible how some of the videos only have a couple of hundred views. More
people need to see and listen.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson](https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson)

~~~
tosh
""" "Silicon Valley Story" — a Very Short Romantic Comedy by Ted Nelson

A playful story about the microcircuitry of love, with Ted Nelson as an
absentminded genius, featuring Doug Engelbart as Ted's father and Stewart
Brand as the villainous CEO.

Closing song: "Information Flow", sung by Donna Spitzer and the auteur. """

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXlyMrv8_dQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXlyMrv8_dQ)

------
ericjang
He mentions at 14:00 the "Dark Brown" experience, where he went to Brown
University to make the HyperText system. He says "he had to work under a
torrent of insults from someone who he thought was his friend and HyperText
got dumbed down."

Though he doesn't mention who the "friend" was, is it the much-beloved (by
Brown CS dept) Andy van Dam (who is credited as the co-designer of HES)?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andries_van_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andries_van_Dam)

------
subsidd
I am probably too young and uninformed but would love if somebody could
enlighten me more about "Ted Nelson" because after watching his videos and
reading about him on wikipedia and from other sources, I find a little
difficult to understand the fan following he has in the form of comments on
his videos or in this thread.

In the video he claims to be the first one to imagine a lot of things in his
era, very novel to information science which unfortunately he hasn't been able
to materialize yet and from the tone he claims all of the above makes me a
little uncomfortably skeptical. IMO, nobody is ever first to imagine anything,
historically great ideas have simultaneously popped up into quite a few heads
and claiming that you were the first doesn't show a healthy state of outlook.

~~~
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](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.

------
jhanschoo
It seems to me that with some marketing polish and some work for
interoperability with the test of the WWW, Xanadu is perfect as a blogging or
wiki platform.

------
juancampa
Wondering if he wrote this using Project Xanadu [1]

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

