The mother of all demos

It’s December 9, 1968. A thousand computer professionals were about to be blown away by a presentation that showcased many of the fundamentals we still use more than half a century later.

Douglas Engelbart set up on stage to demonstrate the oN-Line System. Until then, computers were room-sized machines doing boring work like payroll crunching, complex missile trajectories, and cryptography.

His idea was to build a machine that a person could use interactively to augment their intelligence.

The project kicked off in the early 60s with funding from NASA and ARPA, and a year before a man first stepped on the moon, Engelbart was ready to present what would be later named the mother of all demos.

It’s still impressive how many concepts we now use came from that one demo.

The computer had a mouse and a graphical user interface. It had windows, could render graphics, do word processing and revision control, and had hypertext (with links).

It’s all good stuff on the bleeding edge, and I imagine people nodded with approval.

And then Engelbard opens a teleconference. A video of his buddy shows up on the screen, and they start talking to each other and can see each other’s screens.

It’s essentially the 1960s version of editing together in Google Docs while on a video call.

This demo prompted Xerox to start a similar project, which in turn inspired Steve Jobs to design the Macintosh, and the rest is history.

Even though command lines dominated for years to come, and even though I spent most of my early computing days in DOS, the concepts were here to stay.

Sometimes, I find it useful to look back at the history of computing. It’s fascinating and humbling. Everything we are building now is possible because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

In the last two years, natural language processing has become so good that it is changing how we use computers.

It’s still early days and things feel rough around the edges. Integrations have not yet fully reached the OS level and sometimes the results are clunky. But it’s getting better, and soon, we’ll be directing the computer by talking to it rather than by typing.

We seem to be closer to the world described in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think.

What started with that demo has been a long evolution, but who knows, fifty years from now, someone may look back on our time and marvel at how the next phase of human-computer interaction began.

Yours,

Taj