Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
&quot;If I hadn&#x27;t snubbed Jobs and Woz, I might&#x27;ve been the Jef Raskin of Apple&quot;<p>That quote made me look up who Ted Nelson was. His most notable project that I see is Xanadu which Wired described as &quot;the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing&quot;. Started in 1960, it didn&#x27;t ship a working version until 2014.<p>I don&#x27;t disagree that the Media Lab often overhypes things. But you need to be able to sell your ideas and get people excited about them to have an impact on the world. That involves being positive and having genuine excitement for the potential of something which today might be very hacky. I&#x27;m convinced this positivity is a lot of what makes Silicon Valley work.<p>A long time after Xanadu was founded, a contractor at CERN put together a basic, very imperfect way of publishing and connecting research papers on the computer networks called the World Wide Web. The Xanadu team said he stole their ideas and it was a &quot;bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives of varied people and it has a terrible programming language&quot;. Tim Berners-Lee just kept shipping code and getting people to join his vision of the future and so today his WWW is what we&#x27;re all using.