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lproven
One of the most important half-a-dozen living figures in the world of computing, and almost totally unrecognised.

He deserves more respect.

rsj_hn
Almost no one remembers Gary Kildall, either. Yet no computer (or for that matter, compiler) would be recognizable if not for his achievements.
lproven
Pretty much true -- but Dr Kildall's company was huge in its time, its product dominated the infant PC industry, and of course dictated the design of MS-DOS 1.x. His influence was great. Nelson's work _inspired_ the biggest technological development of the last 30 years, but it never shipped, and what we got is a pale shadow of his idea.
abecedarius
Nelson is a good example to keep in mind of the headwinds against "Crazy New Ideas" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27061789 on the front page now). Be one of the first in the world with a historically great idea, bet your career on it, and you still may not end up with much credit. (I'm not claiming he deserves all of the credit.)

http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an... gives a taste of what it was like before the web to try to explain the potential.

teknolog
I actually happened to get a personal demo of Xanadu from Ted himself a few years ago. While it has some clever ideas and clearly was ahead of its time, they weren't really able to execute on them in a reasonable timeframe. The web won because it shipped.