<story><title>50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)</title><url>https://amasad.me/moad</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>What do you mean?  He was funded by SRI for a long time, and spent time visiting other people and spreading the word.  I first met him when he visited PARC, probably for the upteent time but I’d just joined.&lt;p&gt;He was full of interesting ideas, not someone who just had one big insight long ago, and was great to talk to about your own work.&lt;p&gt;His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades. Mind boggling how that works — quite different from a fully remote world. We talk about WFH vs office, but less about the value of running into Doug engelbart or don knuth while walking down the street.</text></item><item><author>rmason</author><text>I had the change to meet him in SF.  He was an inspirational guy, the only other person I heard speak who made you want to leave the room and start building something, anything was Woz.&lt;p&gt;But I am left wondering what could have been, what might have been.  Nobody would fund him.  Apple probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget.  Who knows what he might have invented?  He had that rare ability to see into the future.  The world lost a good thirty years of his genius and not being a Valley insider I am left wondering why?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hermitian909</author><text>&amp;gt; His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades&lt;p&gt;I was at that service and several people spoke about how his ideas did not really get the backing they deserved, Ted Nelson not the least of them.&lt;p&gt;This makes more sense when you realize that what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked far more than he wanted to invent cool new tech, but while people were happy to have him as a member of staff he needed to be given freedom to play with organizations and no one was ready to try anything as radical as he had in mind.&lt;p&gt;I remember there was a period where Google was trying to make him a permanent fixture and he said in a private conversation something to the effect of it feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue, not engage with his ideas.</text></comment>
<story><title>50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)</title><url>https://amasad.me/moad</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>What do you mean?  He was funded by SRI for a long time, and spent time visiting other people and spreading the word.  I first met him when he visited PARC, probably for the upteent time but I’d just joined.&lt;p&gt;He was full of interesting ideas, not someone who just had one big insight long ago, and was great to talk to about your own work.&lt;p&gt;His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades. Mind boggling how that works — quite different from a fully remote world. We talk about WFH vs office, but less about the value of running into Doug engelbart or don knuth while walking down the street.</text></item><item><author>rmason</author><text>I had the change to meet him in SF.  He was an inspirational guy, the only other person I heard speak who made you want to leave the room and start building something, anything was Woz.&lt;p&gt;But I am left wondering what could have been, what might have been.  Nobody would fund him.  Apple probably should have just given him a lab with a couple of employees and a modest budget.  Who knows what he might have invented?  He had that rare ability to see into the future.  The world lost a good thirty years of his genius and not being a Valley insider I am left wondering why?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rektide</author><text>This 3-day old comment, quoting a description of his time at Tymnet, fits all too much what I&amp;#x27;d expect of a starlings middle&amp;#x2F;late career, of talent being unsupported.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31633395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31633395&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>