Oh dear. This is a Jef Raskin-esque rant of an old man that's realised they aren't going to be nearly as influential in the history books as they once thought. I would hope never to have to do the same, either from delusions in the present or anger at the end!<p>This business of underplaying or demeaning the importance of the use of icons, fonts, or familiar metaphors in favour of some abstract notion of an interface that no one has succeeded in ever implementing, not least because no one can agree on what it should be, is a running theme. This is often accompanied by banging on about the importance of what are really just clerical operations.<p>PARC, like any office of a large organisation, was invariably subject to revisionist history, office politics and all sorts of other nonsense, but attempting to deny the fact they did produce the direction for our last 30 years (and possibly into the near future) is ludicrous, much as a similar rant against Bell Labs would be misguided.<p>Most specifically he glosses over the fact that the nature of applications in the environments at PARC had far blurrier lines around the edges than say iOS apps do. They had things like OLE, which the web is clearly trending to recreate in the form of web components because though implementations have sucked the idea itself makes sense to people.<p>Paying close attention to the ideas from PARC you can see that the real philosophical difference is Nelson is closer to the idea of an all ruling single document format - whereas the vision PARC believed in was an all ruling single code format. Once more the parallel to the evolution of the web is clear, in that what began as a way to distribute documents is morphing, slowly, into a method for distributing rich code objects.