40th Anniversary of the Mother of all Demos

Today is the 40th anniversary of what came to be known as “The Mother of All Demos”, Doug Engelbart’s presentation to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. In this one 90 minute presentation he showed, in working form, for the very first time all of the following technologies:

• The mouse
• Graphical user interface with point and click and menus
• Intermingling of text and graphics within a document, styling of text in a document
• Hypertext and linking between documents
• Remote collaboration plus videoconferencing

That’s a pretty astonishing list. It basically described the landscape of computing for the following decades, presaging things like desktop publishing and the world wide web. And some things, like the remote collaboration and videoconferencing, we are still struggling to do well today. The fact that they were able to pull it off with a home-made modem forty years ago is amazing. Remember, this wasn’t a simulation, this was working hardware and software being shown in real time.

This page at Stanford has video of the full 90 minute demo, broken into chunks. This is the highest quality version I’ve seen.

Google Video has the full 90 minute video also.

Related articles

• Robert X. Cringely on Doug Englebart and why his work didn’t get recognized as widely
• Wired article with an historical view of the demo

Computer Museum

I stumbled across a rather good computer museum while in Paris, at the top of the Grande Arche of all places. It had a great collection of vintage gear. Here are a few of the more interesting images of some classic computing paraphenalia. You can see the whole gallery here.

The Apple IIc, designed by frog design, where I work, back in the day

A rather interesting leather-wrapped one designed to mimic a briefcase, for the high-powered executive looking to lug around 20 pounds of gear

Ah, the Sinclair ZX81, which I learned to program in BASIC on. Very cheap, very slow, very little memory (1 kilobyte of RAM, no hard drive), but actually quite innovative in many ways.

The “Trash 80” from Radio Shack. Back when Radio Shack was a computing super-power…

No idea what these buttons do, but they look cool

A recreated “typical” teenage computer geek bedroom, circa 1982

I’m not sure that “Environment of exploitation” means the same thing in French as it does in English, but it is humorously apropos for Microsoft

A Cray Super Computer in stylish green vinyl. When it’s cold in the winter, you can sit on its warming bench.

Lastly, some switches on an old piece of equipment