Mother of All Demos: Mouse and Hypertext Born

Douglas Engelbart stood before a crowd of roughly 1,000 computer professionals at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, and demonstrated the future. Over 90 minutes, he unveiled the computer mouse, hypertext linking, real-time collaborative editing, video conferencing, and a windowed graphical interface. Every element of modern personal computing was present in embryonic form on that stage. The audience had never seen anything like it, and the demonstration became known as "The Mother of All Demos." Engelbart's presentation ran on the oN-Line System (NLS), developed at the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center with funding from ARPA, the military research agency that also funded the internet's predecessor. The system ran on a mainframe 30 miles away in Menlo Park, connected to the San Francisco convention center via a custom microwave link. Engelbart operated it live, clicking a three-button wooden mouse with his right hand while typing commands with a five-key "chord set" in his left. The demonstrations cascaded in rapid succession. Engelbart created a document, then linked words within it to other documents using hypertext. He showed a split screen with two users editing the same file simultaneously from remote terminals. He opened a video connection to a colleague in Menlo Park, and their faces appeared side by side on the projection screen. He manipulated text, reorganized outlines, and navigated between files with a fluidity that personal computer users would not experience for another 15 years. The audience responded with a standing ovation, but the computing establishment largely ignored Engelbart's vision. His lab hemorrhaged talent to Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, and PARC's Alto computer incorporated many of his ideas. Steve Jobs saw the Alto in 1979 and built the Macintosh around its concepts. Engelbart received the National Medal of Technology in 2000, three decades after he had shown the world what computers could become.