December 9, 1968

The Mother of All Demos

Douglas Engelbart and the ARC team publicly demonstrate NLS

His mouse clicks travelled about 30 miles to a computer in Menlo Park, and live video came back to a 20-foot screen in San Francisco. The risky remote presentation worked.

Brooks Hall, 9 December 1968

At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on 9 December 1968, Douglas Engelbart took the stage for a 90-minute live session titled “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect.”

He drove SRI's NLS computer in Menlo Park from the stage, working a keyboard, a three-button mouse and a five-key chord set. Engelbart had pushed for the long plenary slot because written explanations of the system had not conveyed it.

What the audience actually saw

Engelbart demonstrated hypertext links, outlining and text editing, flexible views and windows, and remote shared-screen collaboration with colleagues 30 miles away — two people at different sites editing and discussing the same material in real time.

Bill English directed the machinery behind it: computer data, live cameras, microwave video and split-screen projection onto a 20-foot screen. Seventeen members of the Augmentation Research Center contributed.

A public debut, not an invention

About 1,000 computer professionals watched, and the session ended with a standing ovation. The mouse got its public debut here; prototypes and comparative testing had come earlier.

The other pieces had histories too. Ted Nelson had published the term hypertext in 1965, and Brown University's Hypertext Editing System was operating by 1967. The nickname “Mother of All Demos” was applied later, by the computer scientist Andries van Dam.

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