The Demo That Showed the Future, 40 Years Early
Zusammenfassung
On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart stood before 1,000 engineers at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco and demonstrated, in a single 90-minute session: the computer mouse, video conferencing, real-time collaborative document editing, hypertext linking, and windowed interfaces. None of these technologies existed commercially. Most would not reach consumers for another 15 to 40 years. The presentation was later named “The Mother of All Demos.”
What Was Demonstrated
Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute demonstrated their NLS (oN-Line System), a networked computing environment that treated the computer as a tool for augmenting human intellect rather than replacing human clerks.
In 90 minutes, the audience saw:
- The mouse: A wooden device with two metal wheels, moving a cursor on screen in real time
- Video conferencing: Engelbart’s face appeared in a window on the main display; he was physically elsewhere in the building
- Collaborative editing: Two people edited the same document simultaneously from different terminals, each seeing the other’s changes in real time
- Hypertext: Documents linked to other documents via clickable references
- Windows: Multiple independent views on a single screen
The audience gave a standing ovation. Several attendees later described it as the most significant event they had witnessed in computing.
The 40-Year Gap
The technologies Engelbart demonstrated in 1968 became mainstream consumer products on the following timeline:
- Mouse: 1984 (Apple Macintosh)
- Windowed GUI: 1984
- Hypertext links: 1991 (World Wide Web)
- Video conferencing (consumer): 2003–2011 (Skype)
- Real-time collaborative editing: 2006–2010 (Google Docs)
Engelbart received almost no commercial benefit from NLS. His research group was largely dissolved after ARPA funding shifted. Xerox PARC absorbed several of his team members, who brought the mouse and windowed interfaces to the Alto — which Apple then copied into the Macintosh.
Engelbart received the Turing Award in 1997 for his work. He had been demonstrating the future for nearly three decades before the industry caught up.