I think most of the, informed, praise is for the fact that he did it rather than than for what he did, if that makes sense. As a solo effort it's impressive and

I think most of the, informed, praise is for the fact that he did it rather than than for what he did, if that makes sense. As a solo effort it's impressive and made more so because of his illness. Having said that, I think the two main areas that I've seen praised are the "coding the image" approach he took which has its predecessors in Lisp machines and Smalltalk. Also the pervasive hypertext and embedded media. Of course, those things aren't especially original and it's not obvious to me that he took them in directions that are especially novel. On a purely speculative level, what might catch on (though I give it a very small probability) is that TempleOS is a deliberately un-networked OS that gives complete control to the user. It's not inconceivable that, as paranoia becomes the sensible default, more folk will decide that that's a good place to be. I doubt it but you never know.