The Mother of All Demos Turns 40

On December 9, 1968, 40 years ago today, Doug Engelbart unleashed The Mother of All Demos onto an unsuspecting world.

If you’ve never seen the demo, I highly recommend watching at least part of it. The way it is filmed makes it seem like a message beamed from a space station in the future.

The amazing thing about the demo is just the sheer number of new paradigms introduced. The demo showed off a mouse, a GUI, windowing, videoconferencing, hypertext, word processing, and email. That is, pretty much everything that personal computing has been based on these last 40 years. We should all take a moment and wonder at how much Engelbart’s vision of the future has come to pass and how much because of that, the world has changed. Kicker Studio is about a mile away from where the demo was done, and now, 40 years later, we’re surrounded by hundreds of companies like ours whose existence is predicated almost entirely on the computing paradigms Engelbart laid out.

As Wendy Ju writes in “The Mouse, The Demo, and the Big Idea” in HCI Remixed regarding The Mother of All Demos:

[T]his is part of the power of the Big Idea. It doesn’t even have to be right. It just has to compel us to go out and do stuff, stuff that is different from what everyone else wants to do. We can make our work valuable to those who only have the vaguest inkling at what we’re getting at. Time will sort the good from the bad. And, sometimes, when all is said and done, our Big Ideas might just buy us a slice of immortality.

One footnote: Engelbart might have bought a slice of immortality, but he never received any royalties for the mouse, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Tuesday, December 9, 2008, at 10:31 am. Filed under Industrial Design, Inspiration, Interaction Design. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.