* * * * *
The Mother of all Demos
> On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers
> working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research
> Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public
> demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since
> 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint
> Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it
> was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. 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.
>
Doug Engelbart's 1968 Demo [1]
It's interesting watching the demo. There's a keyboard in the center, a
rather large unergonomic looking mouse to the right, and a 5-key chorded
keyboard to the left. Other than the shape, the mouse is easily recognizable
as a mouse (a three button mouse no less). The chorded keyboard is rather odd
(and something that didn't make it in today's mass market). The features
include composition, editing, linking (like links used on the web today, but
possibly more sophisticated) and collaborative work being done on two
computers at the same time.
It would be an impressive system today. Back in 1968 it was mind blowing.
But he wasn't the only one working on hypertext at the time—there was Ted
Nelson and his work on Xanadu [2] (which has yet to be finished today).
[1]
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
[2]
http://www.udanax.com/
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