On December 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart Did 90 Minutes of Live Demos and Invented the Modern Computer

On the afternoon of December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium, Douglas Engelbart took a stage in front of about 1,000 computing professionals and gave a 90-minute live demonstration that did not stop. Sitting at a custom workstation, he showed his audience a mouse — a wooden box with two wheels that he and Bill English had prototyped at Stanford Research Institute. He showed text editing with cut, copy, and paste. He showed hypertext linking that jumped between documents on click. He showed real-time collaboration with a colleague seventeen miles away in Menlo Park. He showed video conferencing in a window on the same screen. He showed outline view, file revision tracking, and command shortcuts.

The show was nontrivially produced. Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, ran the camera. Two custom 1200-baud modems connected the auditorium to the Stanford Research Institute over a leased line provided by ARPA. An Eidophor projector threw the output onto a 22-foot screen. Engelbart wore an earpiece feeding him cues from his team. Andy van Dam later remembered the audience reaction simply: "Everybody was blown away."

The immediate impact was small. Many of those same computer professionals went home and continued specifying machines that read punch cards. The deferred impact was almost everything. Engineers from Engelbart's lab carried the ideas to Xerox PARC, where they became the Alto. From the Alto they reached Steve Jobs and the Macintosh, and from there the rest of computing. The Computer History Museum eventually canonized the talk as "the Mother of All Demos."