I first visited San Francisco in 1985 on my way to Boston for MacWorld Expo. I returned a few months later for the west coast MacWorld. Little did I know that key pieces of the ‘revolutionary’ Mac technolgy were demonstrated in same convention center almost two decades earlier, on December 9th, 1968. It has since come to be known as the Mother of all Demos and today hundreds of tech luminaries gathered to honour the brilliant man behind that demo, Doug Englebart.
On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing: for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing.
It changed what is possible. The 1968 demo presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing to social networking. The demo embodied Doug Engelbart’s vision of solving humanity’s most important problems by using computers to improve communication and collaboration.
Today was another great reminder of why I moved to San Francisco!Â
Full coverage via Google News and Technorati, plus an interesting mindmap/timeline. (Unfortunately much of the coverage focuses on the mouse, but Doug the mouse was just a tiny piece of the puzzle he was solving.)
