The Mother of All Demos: a 90-minute glimpse of the future

1968

On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart and his team from the Stanford Research Institute gave a live demonstration that would later be called "The Mother of All Demos."

For 90 minutes, Engelbart showed technologies that wouldn't become mainstream for decades:

The computer mouse: a wooden block with two wheels that translated hand movement into cursor movement on screen. Nobody had seen anything like it.

Hypertext links: clickable text that jumped to related information. This was 1968, 23 years before the World Wide Web.

Real-time collaborative editing: two people editing the same document simultaneously, with changes appearing on both screens in real time. Google Docs wouldn't offer this until 2006.

Video conferencing: Engelbart talked to a colleague at the lab 30 miles away, their faces visible on screen. Zoom wouldn't exist for another 43 years.

Windowed interfaces: multiple documents visible in separate areas of the screen. The Macintosh wouldn't ship until 1984.

The demo was technically stunning. Engelbart sat on stage with a custom keyboard, the mouse, and a large projected display, while his team operated the equipment back at the lab. The signal traveled over a dedicated microwave link.

But the audience's reaction was mixed. Many were amazed. Others walked out confused: the concepts were so far ahead of their time that people literally couldn't process what they were seeing. Some thought it was faked.

Engelbart's lab, the Augmentation Research Center, was eventually defunded. His researchers scattered to Xerox PARC and other labs, carrying his ideas with them. Those ideas became the foundation of personal computing.

Engelbart spent the rest of his life largely unrecognized by the mainstream. He received the National Medal of Technology in 2000, but by then the world had moved on. He died in 2013, aged 88.