Douglas Engelbart passed away at the age of 88 on the 2nd of July 2013. Doug was a researcher for SRI. He and his colleagues developed most of what passes for 'personal computing' today. And they did it back in 1968. They also created a 100-minute video about what they came up with that has since been dubbed
The Mother of All Demos.
Anybody care to see how our world (e.g. wordprocessing, hyperlinks, the mouse, GUIs, etc.) began?
Doug's 1968 Demo
On December 9th, 1968 Doug Engelbart appeared on stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco to give his slated presentation, titled "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect," where he spent the next 90 minutes not only telling about his work, but demonstrating it live to a spellbound audience that filled the hall.
Instead of standing at a podium, he was seated at a custom designed console, where he drove his presentation through his NLS computer residing 30 miles away in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute, onto a large projection screen overhead, flipping seamlessly between his presentation outline and live demo of features, while video teleconferencing members of his research lab linking in from SRI in shared screen mode to demonstrate more of the system.
This seminal demonstration came to be known as "The Mother of All Demos."
More information and links to the videos can be found
here. Especially good are the annotated segments (35 in all) for those who don't go back quite so far that you'd remember the 'state of the art' at the time this demo was first presented. (On second thought, if you do go back
that far, you might need the annotations even more than some of the
young-uns.
)
Awesome!
(Note: the Internet Archive has the
full video available for download. Now you can grab your very own copy to watch at your leisure too!)
