Ted Nelson’s Passionate Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart

It got implemented. Autodesk funded an implementation. I knew the people who did that job. It just wasn’t very useful. It was a centralized storage and revision control scheme for text only (No pictures; Nelson was very text-oriented) tied to a micropayments system. You paid to read a document, and payments were parcelled out to everybody who’d contributed to the document.

The fundamental problem was that it assumed that most text documents were worth orders of magnitude than they are now. Pricing was intended to be comparable to what overpriced academic journals charge for online access today. Another part of the problem was that Nelson had very strong ideas about how it should be implemented, but didn’t know much about database technology.

An Open Letter from Ted Nelson

I cannot begin to express my disappointment at this stage of my life, for decades I been a pioneer at the forefront of digital technology and information sharing. I have developed theories and technologies which are still used today, and have inspired those who have followed in my footsteps, and have too aimed to pioneer an internet that is effective and efficient. However, my life and my work, while a source of motivation and joy, has also been a source of great disappointment.