The Mother of All Demos

"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration, named retroactively, of developments by Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968. The 90-minute live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS, which demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying concepts and technologies influenced the operating systems of the Apple Macintosh, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, the Acorn Archimedes, and the Microsoft Windows graphical user interface, in the 1980s and 1990s.

Background Much of Engelbart's thought that led to the development of his Augmentation Research Center (ARC), as well as the oN-Line System, was derived from the "research culture" of World War II and the early Cold War. A notable source of inspiration to Engelbart was the article "As We May Think", written by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic magazine, which Engelbart read while stationed as a United States Navy radar technician in the Philippines in 1946. In Engelbart's view, in order to steer society into the right use of scientific knowledge derived from the war, that knowledge would need to be better managed and regulated. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner gave voice to this view, which arose from seeing the unintended effects of technology on the postwar world:

[T]he American military had developed technologies with which it might destroy the world. In its wake, scientists and technologists had begun to fan out around the globe, seeking to use their knowledge to eradicate disease and increase food production, often in an effort to win the cold war loyalties of Third World nations. Engelbart had read about these efforts and saw that they often backfired. Rapid food production led to the depletion of the soil; the eradication of insects led to ecological imbalances. This ultimately led to the idea that beyond merely performing calculations, computers could be used to augment the capabilities of the human mind.

Demonstration

Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers at his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) located in Stanford University's Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the early 1960s. His idea was to free computing from merely being about number crunching and for it to become a tool for communications and information-retrieval. He wanted to turn Vannevar Bush's idea for a Memex machine into reality, where a machine used interactively by one person could "augment" their intelligence. Over the course of six years, with the funding help of both NASA and ARPA, his team went about putting together all the elements that would make such a computer system a reality. At the urging of ARPA's director, Robert Taylor, the NLS would make its first public appearance at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium. The conference session was presented under the title A research center for augmenting human intellect. Approximately 1,000 computer professionals were in attendance in the auditorium to witness the presentation. Notable attendees in the audience included Alan Kay, Charles Irby and Andy van Dam, as well as Bob Sproull. Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team (including Bill Paxton), with Bill English directing the presentation's technical elements, demonstrated NLS's functions. The presentation used an Eidophor video projector that allowed the video output from the NLS computer to be displayed on a large 6.7-metre (22 ft) high screen so the audience could see what Engelbart was doing. The Augment researchers also created two customized homemade modems at 1200 baud – high-speed for 1968 – linked via a leased line to transfer data from the computer workstation keyboard and mouse at the Civic Auditorium to their Menlo Park headquarters' SDS-940 computer. In order to provide live two-way video between the lab and the conference hall, two microwave links were used. English also commanded a video switcher that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator in Menlo Park was Stewart Brand, who at the time was a non-computer person, best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart Brand advised Engelbart and the team about how to present the demo. Engelbart got to know Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at the same lab. During the 90-minute presentation, Engelbart used his mouse prototype to move around the screen, highlight text, and resize windows. This was the first time that an integrated system for manipulating text onscreen was presented publicly. At separate times, his Augment associates Jeff Rulifson and Bill Paxton appeared in another portion of the screen to help edit the text remotely from ARC. While they were editing they could see each other's screen, talk and see each other as well. He further demonstrated that clicking on underlined text would then link to another page of information, demonstrating the concept of hypertext. When he finished the demonstration, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To further demonstrate the system, a separate room was set aside so that attendees could take a closer look at the NLS workstations and ask Engelbart questions. One last notion is that of Engelbart's NLS system. As Fred Turner stated in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture:

Engelbart promulgated a philosophy of 'bootstrapping', in which each experimental transformation of the socio-technical system that was the NLS would feed back into the system itself, causing it to evolve (and presumably to improve).

Influence

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