Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Global Age

"The Mother of All Demos" — Douglas Engelbart

1968 AD · Transmission: Global
ComputingInventionNorth American

Douglas Engelbart, at the Stanford Research Institute, presented on December 9, 1968, before an audience of a thousand people in San Francisco, a ninety-minute public demonstration of the NLS (oN-Line System), developed by his team at the Augmentation Research Center. In a single live session, connected by microwave link to his laboratory fifty kilometers away, Engelbart presents for the first time, in integrated form: the mouse as a pointing device, navigable hypertext via links, multiple windows on screen, real-time collaborative text editing among several remote users, and videoconferencing with the image of his remote collaborator overlaid on screen. Each of these elements would, by itself, be a substantial innovation; presented together and working in a single coherent demonstration, they anticipate by fifteen years the graphical user interface that Apple and Microsoft would later popularize commercially, and by thirty years the online collaboration (Google Docs) and video-calling tools that would become widespread with broadband internet. The demonstration, recorded on video and preserved, would retrospectively be nicknamed "The Mother of All Demos" for its disproportionate influence on the subsequent development of personal computing: among those attending or directly influenced were researchers who would later found or define Xerox PARC, whose graphical interface would in turn inspire the Apple Macintosh.

InstitutionStanford Research Institute (SRI), Menlo Park, California
Historical regionUSA (California)
Primary sourceEngelbart, D.C. & English, W.K. — "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect" (AFIPS Conference Proceedings, 33, 395–410, 1968)
Secondary sourceTuring Award 1997 — Press release (amturing.acm.org); Bardini, T. — Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford University Press, 2000)
Original languageEnglish
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