Your preface to the UserLand thread was fantastic. "We haven't even INVENTED twitter yet, but I promise y'all will ENJOY the hell out of this series of comments-with-character-limits, but you're gonna do it IRONICALLY."
It's been about a year since I talked to Ted Nelson, and I suspect the talk you saw at Almaden would've been close to the height of his bitterness about HTTP. He also speaks frankly about the deeper aspect of his bitterness, retrospecting on the 70s back in 1990:
I am curious about your current assessment that he refuses to collaborate with other people. Obviously he worked with other people to get Xanadu to where it got. And I don't have enough inside knowledge about the competitive strategy of Netscape or other commercial hypertext vendors, but I'm sure there was a lot more going on around the open sourcing decision. At least with nearly 20 years of hindsight since the open sourcing, he seems perfectly clear-eyed about the failure of the Xanadu project.
I would love to hear that postmortem more than I want to read the released code, too. But when I asked him about it, Ted just seemed a lot more interested in talking about the good ideas from Xanadu. Sure, he strikes me as a little grumpy, but I don't know anyone my age or older that isn't a little bit grumpy about computing. After I watched that WGBH interview, I developed an enormous amount of empathy for the fact that he had to live through the 70s.
It's been about a year since I talked to Ted Nelson, and I suspect the talk you saw at Almaden would've been close to the height of his bitterness about HTTP. He also speaks frankly about the deeper aspect of his bitterness, retrospecting on the 70s back in 1990:
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_4D37F2D8E1054BA49999027B...
I am curious about your current assessment that he refuses to collaborate with other people. Obviously he worked with other people to get Xanadu to where it got. And I don't have enough inside knowledge about the competitive strategy of Netscape or other commercial hypertext vendors, but I'm sure there was a lot more going on around the open sourcing decision. At least with nearly 20 years of hindsight since the open sourcing, he seems perfectly clear-eyed about the failure of the Xanadu project.
I would love to hear that postmortem more than I want to read the released code, too. But when I asked him about it, Ted just seemed a lot more interested in talking about the good ideas from Xanadu. Sure, he strikes me as a little grumpy, but I don't know anyone my age or older that isn't a little bit grumpy about computing. After I watched that WGBH interview, I developed an enormous amount of empathy for the fact that he had to live through the 70s.