April 14, 2006
MarkBernstein.org
 

Winer on Ted Nelson

Dave Winer blogs Ted Nelson:

The reporter said that Nelson was really weird and kind of rude. I took exception to this. Nelson is a visionary, and a teacher, in many ways it's his passion that's the fabric of the web. If he hadn't written his seminal book in the 70s, I wonder if the web would exist today. Later, I thought, how strange, we want visionaries, we need them, but we want them to fit some impossible concept of humanity. Someone should have passion without being too passionate. I wonder if people have really thought this through. I'm willing to cut a guy like Nelson almost infinite slack, because I so totally appreciate what he has done for us, and for me.

....In every generation there are at most two or three people as influential as Nelson was to people of my generation.