This made me curios: Who or what project do you think is at that point today?
The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying concepts and technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.
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He's brought books to millions of people.
It's software that increased the rate of information access to people. It's what very very few people achieve in a lifetime.
And it's a purely technical solutio, where as Gottfrid Svartholm/Fredrik Neij/Peter Sunde or Alexandra Elbakyan are also very much activists.
Interviews with him don't get upvotes on HN. Bitchy claims do, but also good people defend him. He puts a lot of effort helping the average user, when he should be in god mode only interreacting which high end user who've done the filtering for him.
By "sideloader" I mean that one can manage and upload a collection of ("pirated") literature onto your device. Sometimes it involves non-trivial conversion, so it can be harder than it sounds.