The Mother of All Demos

The Mother of All Demos was a demonstration by Douglas Engelbart, with the assistance of Stewart Brand and others, on December 9, 1968. It took place at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The 90-minute live demonstration introduced many of the fundamental interfaces and data systems that make up a modern computer.

The demo

In the demonstration, Engelbart used a workstation of his design called the NLS. It combined revolutionary features that are commonplace today, including windows, hypertext, videoconferencing, word processing, and dynamic file linking.

The demonstration also included a collaborative real-time editor, not unlike Google Docs. Engelbart controlled the demonstration with a customized chorded keyboard, and a pointing device that few people had ever heard of, called a mouse.

You can view a recording of the demo below.

Computer mouse, Demo, GUI, Hypertext, NLS, Videoconferencing, Word processing