What's HN's opinions on Nelson himself? Barring this article, I've mostly read about his ideas about Xanadu, etc, and while they're not bad per se, they seem rather unfocused and on the whole rather vague -- almost like, engineering/technology in a purely essay tradition. Can anyone point me to his best work? I hear a lot about him but never found much to justify his repute.
I'm hardly representative of "HN's opinions", but describing Nelson's ideas as "unfocused" and "vague" is kind of like the student who complained about Shakespeare's works being "derivative and full of cliches".
Sadly, Xanadu never became the success that Nelson forsaw, but "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" was full of all sorts of incredible new ideas, some Nelson's, some from others that he just collected in one accessible place. Keep in mind that the book was first published in 1974, two years before Jobs & Wozniak formed Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, and seven years before the first IBM PC.
He only became a computer scientist incidentally due to no one being capable of listening to the ideas of a filmmaker/philosopher and attributing technical fortitude to them. Like the previous poster, I recommend Computer Lib/Dream Machines
