My poster from May, titled Every 13 years, an innovation changes computing forever, theorizes that roughly every thirteen years, a new technology appears, and it changes the way we use computers in unexpectedly large ways.
The first entry in my list was an exception because it didn’t feature just one technology, but a number of them. It was “The Mother of All Demos,” a demonstration of technologies that are part of our everyday life now, but must have seemed like pure science fiction at the time, December 9, 1968 — 55 years ago today.
In the demo, computer scientist Douglas Engelbart demonstrated:
- The GUI, complete with resizable windows and selectable, editable text (including copy and paste)
- The mouse
- The chorded keyboard (the one thing in the demo that hasn’t gone mainstream)
- Hypertext — clicking on some underlined text, which would cause a different page of information to appear
- Computer networking
- Videoconferencing
- Projecting a computer screen onto a large screen for an audience
Rather than continue to tell you about it, it’s so much easier to simply show it to you:
Happy 55th anniversary, Mother of All Demos, and thank you, Dr. Engelbart!