The Mother of All Demos

From the hyperlinked Wired.com article...

FIFTY YEARS AGO today, Doug Engelbart showed 2,000 people a preview of the future.

Engelbart gave a demonstration of the "oN-Line System" at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 1968. The oN-Line System was the first hypertext system, preceding the web by more than 20 years. But it was so much more than that. When Engelbart typed a word, it appeared simultaneously on his screen in San Francisco and on a terminal screen at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. When Engelbart moved his mouse, the cursor moved in both locations.

The demonstration was impressive not just because Engelbart showed off Google Docs-style collaboration decades before Google was founded. It was impressive because he and his team at SRI's Augmentation Research Center had to conceive of and create nearly every piece of technology they displayed, from the window-based graphical interface to the computer mouse.

"It made the interaction with the machine almost compelling, it was intimate," says Don Nielson, a retired SRI engineer and executive who wrote a history of SRI called Heritage of Innovation. "Up til then, unless you were a programmer you didn't spend much time in front of a terminal or a teletype or whatever the medium."

"...To Engelbart, his work was never about the technology itself, but about helping people work together to solve the world's biggest problems."

From the SRI News Room, 12/9/18

On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, SRI engineer Doug Engelbart was met with a standing ovation when he gave the first public demonstration of the computer mouse and many key fundamentals of modern computing that ushered in the Information Age.

Engelbart and his SRI team debuted numerous—and now ubiquitous—technology innovations, including hypertext linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, real-time on-screen text editing, shared-screen teleconferencing, and the computer mouse. Engelbart envisioned harnessing the power of computers as tools for collaboration and the augmentation of our collective intelligence to work on humanity’s most important problems.

The demonstration was the first to show how a computer could be used as a tool to capture and share knowledge on a vast scale, a new and revolutionary idea at the time. The computer mouse was an important part of a much larger system to facilitate organizational learning and collaboration. It was the first public demonstration of a real-time collaborative environment between two computer users.

This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.