Mother of All Demos

Overview

A 90-minute public demonstration given by Doug Engelbart on December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in the Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, before an audience of about a thousand computer professionals. Stewart Brand, then publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, ran camera for the event.

The name was applied retrospectively by the journalist Steven Levy in Insanely Great (1994).

Engelbart was on stage at a custom console. The computer, an SDS 940 running the NLS system, was at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, 30 miles away, connected by two leased microwave lines and a homemade modem. His screen was projected behind him on a 22-foot display using a borrowed Eidophor video projector, with his face inset in the corner and his voice carried over the audio.

Demonstration Overview

Nearly everything shown was new to the audience, and most of it was being seen publicly for the first time.

• The mouse. A wooden shell over two perpendicular wheels, invented by Engelbart and built by Bill English in 1964. Engelbart said in a later interview that nobody could recall why it acquired the name, and that the cord had originally come out of the bottom before they turned it around.
• Hypertext. Linked passages that could be followed from one document to another, with the link structure visible and editable.
• Outline processing. Hierarchical document structure with the ability to collapse and expand levels, view a document at any depth, and restructure by moving nodes.
• Windows. Multiple views on screen at once, including split views of different parts of the same file.
• Real-time collaborative editing. Engelbart and Bill Paxton, in Menlo Park, worked on the same document simultaneously, each seeing the other's cursor.
• Video conferencing. Paxton's face appeared on Engelbart's screen alongside the shared document.
• Version control and shared repositories. Files held centrally with a journal recording changes.
• Context-sensitive help and dynamic file linking.
• The chord keyset. A five-key device operated with the left hand, allowing 31 characters through combinations, used alongside the mouse and keyboard.

The team behind the demonstration numbered seventeen researchers at the Augmentation Research Center, funded by ARPA, NASA, and the Air Force's Rome Air Development Center.

Engelbart's actual argument

The devices are what the demonstration is remembered for and they were not the point. Engelbart's program, set out in his 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, was that humanity's problems were growing more complex faster than human capacity to address them, and that the remedy was to raise collective intelligence directly.

His framework was H-LAM/T, standing for Human using Language, Artifacts, and Methodology, in which he is Trained. The claim is that capability comes from the whole system rather than from any component, so improving the tools alone accomplishes little without corresponding changes to language, method, and training.

He also insisted on bootstrapping: the group building the tools should be the group using them to build the tools, so improvements compound. NLS was developed by people who wrote all their documents in NLS.

The chord keyset is the clearest case of the difference. It requires substantial training and then delivers high performance, which fits Engelbart's model of a skilled operator who invests in mastery. The industry adopted the mouse, which requires no training, and dropped the keyset. Engelbart regarded this as the wrong trade and said so for the rest of his life, arguing that optimizing for the first ten minutes of use guarantees mediocrity at ten years.

Consequences

Many of the demonstration's attendees and several ARC researchers, including Bill English, later moved to Xerox PARC. The Alto and the Star drew directly on NLS work, and the line continues through the Macintosh to current interfaces.

Engelbart's laboratory ran the second node on the ARPANET, connected in October 1969, and ARC operated the Network Information Center, the original registry for network addresses.

He received the ACM Turing Award in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology in 2000.

Sources

• Metz, Cade. "The Mother of All Demos: 150 years ahead of its time." The Register, 11 December 2008.
• Tweney, Dylan. "Dec. 9, 1968: The Mother of All Demos." Wired News, 9 December 2008.
• Engelbart, Douglas C. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223, October 1962.
• Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Related Reading

• Computer Lib
• Designing Interactions
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
• The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
• Architectural Intelligence
• Computing in the Middle Ages
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Paul Otlet
• Myth of the Hero
• The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society
• Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean

External Links

• The Demo, Doug Engelbart Institute, full video in 35 clips