Gregory's ServerSimilarly, Tim Griffin's paper on giving a type to call/cc and the conclusion that call/cc implements Goedel's double-negation translation of classical logic into constructive logic was rejected from LICS, the top conference in Theoretical Computer Science.
His work has created a research industry that is still alive today, after 35 years, with thousands of papers.
He has the rejection letter hanging in a wall in his office.
LICS now has the "test of time award", but only for papers published in LICS.
They should also have test of time awards for papers that are rejected from LICS, so that something is learned from that.