Pensieri di un lunatico minore

The future forgotten

40 years ago, on December 8, 1968, the Mother of All Demos was given by Douglas Englebart and his brilliant team. While you’ve probably never heard Dr. Engelbart’s name, you are indubitably a beneficiary of his vision. On that fateful day, a small team would change the course of human history and introduce:

• The mouse
• Videoconferencing
• Email
• Hypertext
• Windowed user interfaces
• Desktop sharing
• Collaborative computing

More than these ideas, though, Dr. Engelbart introduced the idea of the computer as an augmentation to human intellect; a new tool capable of magnifying our capabilities further and further. It is this aspect, along with the fluidity of interaction that has least been captured and realized. Perhaps Alan Kay said it best:

[Engelbart] was one of the very few people very early on who were able to understand not only that computers could do a lot of things that were very familiar, but that there was something new about computers that allow us to think in a very different way—in a stronger way.

[...]

We haven’t forgotten NLS, after 40 years. It’s as good today as it was when we first saw it. The real significance of NLS is that it put a difficult idea into the world and it put it into the world so well that none of us can forget—- and everyone will leave here today and go out and try to get others to understand it.

Alan Kay was there, and would himself go on to change the face of computing.

See the demo for yourself.