Ted Nelson email archive now available
library.stanford.edu
library.stanford.edu
I remember sitting in the car outside the bookstore reading it - it was fascinating, I couldn't wait until I got home.
Seems to me he had some pretty innovative ideas early on, but he's not really an engineer and he could never make it work. He was sort of at the right place at the right time to make some kind of impact anyway.
He's also really good at self promotion.
from the bio on the site selling his book:
“ Nelson co-founded Itty bitty machine company, or "IBM", which was a small computer retail store operating from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. The Itty bitty machine company was one of the few retail stores to sell the original Apple I computer. In 1978 he had a significant impact upon IBM's thinking when he outlined his vision of the potential of personal computing to the team that three years later launched the IBM PC.”
(heartily recommend getting a paper copy of the book if you got $120 lying around, it’s really a unique stack of paper)
> ..In a 2011 article published by Time, Ayyadurai claimed he invented email as a teenager in the late 1970s.
But looks like every email is redacted. I mean 99% redacted. Or is it, something wrong with my browser rendering, that i can't read the text.
Edit: got this response - quoting with permission:
You are not seeing an error, we only display certain information from email collections online (including the names of correspondents, email header information, and extracted entities) to protect the privacy of third party correspondents contained in the archive. Normally you would be able to access the full email collection in our reading room in Green Library on the Stanford Campus, but unfortunately we are only open to Stanford students, staff, and faculty right now due to our COVID restrictions - we're hoping to open up to the general public soon, but we're not there yet!
If you would be interested, I could send specific messages to you via email if you know which ones you would like to read. We would ask you to sign and submit our standard user agreement before receiving the messages and I can send that to you if you would be interested.