In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system (named for Linda Lovelace, an actress in the porn movie Deep Throat, mocking Ada's tribute to Ada Lovelace).[6] Bill Joy cites Linda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini.[7]
On June 24, 1993, Gelernter was severely injured opening a mail bomb sent by the Unabomber. He recovered from his injuries, but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged.[8] He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
He helped found the company Mirror Worlds Technologies, which in 2001 released Scopeware software using ideas from his 1992 book Mirror Worlds. Gelernter believed that computers can free users from being filing clerks by organizing their data.
In 2003, he became a member of the National Council on the Arts.[11]
In October 2016, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump for President, calling Hillary Clinton "as phony as a three-dollar bill," and saying that Barack Obama "has governed like a third-rate tyrant."
Gelernter's book Mirror Worlds (1991) "prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web."[14] Bill Joy, founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, says Gelernter is "one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time."[14] The New York Times called him a computer science "rock star".