My opinion is based on his writings and talks, available on his personal homepage worrydream.com ~ he has prototyped a number of his ideas as interactive webpag

My opinion is based on his writings and talks, available on his personal homepage worrydream.com ~ he has prototyped a number of his ideas as interactive webpages, responsive development environments, demos as part of his talks etc. The genius scale is not usually known to be an objective and absolute system of measurement :) Part of the magic is (I believe) that he was outside of any narrow corporate project, or the confines of the paper publishing & grant system; and was able to explore and develop some of the ideas with the free thinking and depth required on his own time - in this day unfortunately true freedom today lies outside of both industry and academia. I also reject in more essential terms the line of thinking around "actually implemented anything revolutionary as opposed to talks/ideas". Don't underestimate the power of well-argued ideas. See re: horse carriages above. You need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ideas, sketches, equations, talks. If it doesn't make sense to you, fine. If it makes sense to some people, they'll go and use, reuse, some of the ideas in a hundred different projects and implementations. The turing machine was a mathematical device invented to solve a rather abstract mathematical / logical problem. It took some time to get to the iPhone from there. You need free space for the next Turing Machine to come from. Those types of ideas are very rare. Side note - It is curious to me that some of the most interesting projects start out as "side projects" of PhD students, since they have the free time (the true quantity of which rarely admitted), usually not directly related to narrow research focus of whatever P.I. they work below minimum wage for asked them to work on.