The Mother of All Demos: 40 Years
I just noticed that yesterday was the 40-year anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s historic 1968 Human Augmentation demo, affectionately titled “The Mother of All Demos.”
Only slowly has this demo, Douglas, and the Stanford Research Institute team (The Augmentation Research Center, or ARC) gotten the recognition they deserve for the groundbreaking work they did here. The system they developed was called NLS or “oN-Line System.” Many of the concept developed for and presented here didn’t even have names back in 1968:
- The computer mouse (only recently named) as a alternative input device.
- Chording keyboard technology, a keyboard where multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously to issue a single command.
- Hypertext, or the concept of endowing a word to be a link to more information *about* that word.
- Electronic collaboration, the ability to share information and meta-information with other people in the same electronic system.
- Multimedia conferencing, sharing both audio, video, and electronic information simultaneously.
- Teleconferencing, being able to conference people in from remote locations.
- Metatext, the ability to endow text or other userland objects with contextual information.
- Email. Do I even have to say any more here?
In certain ways, a lot of the concepts and technologies we enjoy today with our networked PCs not only were first realized in 1968, but were then immediately stuffed back into the closet because of the explosive and unforeseen growth of “personal computers” in the ’70s an ’80s. Because they were so popular, funding for large, expensive collaborative systems such as the one in this demo dried up.
Only after years of first standalone PC use, local area networks and finally the internet did these technologies come back to the fore.
So, after 40 years, I’d simply like to say: Doug, you and the ARC team were right. You touched the obelisk and the rest of us ran away. Thank you.
You can find more on Douglas Engelbart, ARC, The NLS demo and more at these links: