> Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right.
No, I'd argue, they were able to ship. To a surprising degree, given what they had at the time. Perhaps you know who they are and what their influences are, but I don't think you've looked at their work in depth if that's what you came away with.
Alan Kay et al shipped Smalltalk and the Alto machines at a time when personal computers weren't even a thing. That means inventing all the hardware and the software concepts.
Engelbart et al. Shipped all the modern ideas of computing that you take for granted today--networking, mouse, bitmap displays. In 1963, six years before people landed on the moon.
"We had to make our own computer display. You couldn’t buy them. I think it cost us $90,000 in 1963 money. We just had to build it from scratch. The display driver was a hunk of electronics 3 feet by 4 feet."
> But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches.
I have a more generous take on this. They talk about these things still, because deep ideas are hard to convey. We've copied some of the surface ideas, but we still are missing some things. I thought I knew what OOP was from my experience with C++, Java, Objective C, and Ruby, but it wasn't until I looked at Smalltalk that I saw the ideas were actually quite different.
All this to say that, we agree they're visionaries, but I disagree that they didn't ship. They did indeed ship, at a time when they had to invent the tools and concepts to build what they built.