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Ted Nelson's Passionate Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart
theodp writes "Speaking at a memorial event for the legendary Douglas Engelbart at the Computer History Museum, Ted Nelson was pissed-with-a-capital-P. Nelson in effect gave two powerful eulogies — one for his friend Dr. Engelbart, who left this Earth in July, and a second for Engelbart's career, which essentially began 'dying' four decades earlier due to short-sighted organizations' failure to fund the brilliant guy who gave the world The Mother of All Demos in 1968. 'Let us never forget that Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA,' Nelson laments. 'Doug Engelbart was dumped by SRI, Doug Engelbart was snubbed by Xerox PARC, and for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us further...Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime.' It's a very moving and passionate speech (despite some oddly inappropriate audience laughter). And, alas, a very sad one in a world that throws $4 billion at the likes of Snapchat and Pinterest."
otoh, 40 yrs ago, ageism practically didn't exist. older meant more experienced and wiser. we used to respect it.
now, if you are over 35, its hard to get an interview, let alone get hired.
things have gotton worse, not better.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Using proper punctuation, capitalization and spelling might also be a factor.
Ted's "Project Xanadu" was a very early vision of a large semantic hypertext network, very much like the modern web in some ways. But it never quite solidified into something that could take off on its own power. I'd wager that Ted sees more than a little of Doug in himself: an inventor of great things who -- in the end -- was largely ignored and forgotten.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
No, they've gotten both better and worse, in other words, things are different.
You're right; ageism is much worse these days in computer-related professions (and others). However, OTOH, technology is cheap and easily-accessible today, unlike 40 years ago. Today, if you're brilliant, you don't need some big institution to give you access to their computers for you to do computer-related work; you can buy a laptop for $100-200 on Ebay and do all the coding you want. You can even easily start a business with it: write a brilliant app for smartphones, start your own 1-person company, and sell it on iTunes/Google Play and make millions potentially. Or you can start a highly-successful open-source project and become the next Linus Torvalds or Guido von Rossum. Unfortunately, Engelbart retired about the time microcomputers were starting to become popular, so he was well ahead of his time.