Mother Of All Demos

Where To Start

I would be pretty confident in claiming that you have never heard of a man named Douglas Engelbart.   Before you Google his name, let me share with you what you will find.  Engelbart received his B.S. degree from Oregon State College in 1948.  From there there he went on to obtain his M.S. in 1953 and Ph.D. in 1955 from Berkeley.   All of those were in electrical engineering.  Between his undergraduate degree and graduate degrees, he found himself engaged and soon to be married, but hadn't settled on a career yet.  He found he didn't have any real goals in life other than marriage and some kind of a job.  So he sat down and over the span of some months, he came to conclude several points on his future.  

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His plans were as follows:

1. He would make the world a better place.
2. He would not be able to do that alone.  It would take many people.
3. If he could improve on the how of that, he could be more productive and effective.
4. His focus would be on computers.

After graduate school, he went on to work for Standford.  At Standford, he worked on computers and electronics, something most electrical engineers were doing during the 1950s and 1960s, at least if you worked at a research institute like Engelbart did.  At Stanford, he founded a lab called ARC (Augmentation Research Center).  The driving principle behind ARC was Engelbart's four point plan from above.   You use a mouse with your computer?  Engelbart invented that in the mid 1960s!   

Other things Engelbart and ARC developed in the 1960s were such things as graphical screens, hypertext (the H in HTML stands for hypertext), user-interface conventions, and many more things that were way ahead of their time.

So why bring up something from so long ago?  Because we take for granted things like editting a file in Microsoft Word, or hopping into Google and searching for who won the World Series in 1933.  We move our mouse and click the links every day and think nothing of it.  If you're reading this on a Windows or Apple computer, note that the mouse didn't become available for that hardware until the mid 1980s!  

Bringing It All Together

All of this brings me to the point of this article.  It's the  Mother Of All Demos.  In 1968 in San Francisco, Engelbart did a demonstration of a system caled NLS that demonstrated some of the things he and his crew at ARC were working on.  Luckily, the demo was filmed!  It later became known as the Mother Of All Demos because of the things Engelbart demonstrated during it!  Things that today we take for granted!  But this was at a point where the things he demonstrated wouldn't become mainstream until decades later.  Something as simple as cut and paste!    

I recommend you head over to YouTube and watch the demo itself.  You will not only enjoy it - since Engelbart is a very skilled demonstrator - but you will learn where the vast majority of things we use today - with respect to computers - originated.