Doug Engelbart's "mother of all demos" video from 1968
Myst co-creator Robyn Miller writes about computer pioneer Doug Engelbart's "mother of all demos" from 1968.
What I didn't know until recently, is that a stunted version of hypertext had been demonstrated as early as 1968. This was no run-of-the-mill boring-vision-of-the-future demo. This was, simply put, "The Mother of All Demos". Steven Levy first gave it that name and it seems to have stuck: The Mother of All Demos (and oh I really love that name). Douglas Engelbart's whirling vision of the future; it was the first public use of a mouse, as well as examples of cutting, copying, pasting, teleconferencing, video conferencing, email, and... hypertext. It's just too damn much for 1968! From Steven Levy in his book, Insanely Great, The Life and Times of the Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything:Link"... a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos. Engelbart's support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert. ..."
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ah members thet! thet there "moose" thang!
Kind of makes you wonder what DARPA & other black budget ops have up their sleeves, these days...
OMG this is geek porn at its absolute!
I loves it.
Obdan, it's true: this is the primal scene of modern computing.
I'm gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Hornswoggled. Transfixed. This is like watching video of Newton and the apple. I have been reading this story for 25 years, but I had no idea there was VIDEO. Unfreakingbelievable.
Note that the remote mouse, the one at Menlo Park, has it's tail going the wrong way, down under his hand. I love it when he says "I have no idea why we called it a mouse" and the guy moves his hand -- it looks like a mouse, duh.
You steampunkers would do better to recreate that funky 3-way all-in-one keyboard+mouse+five-key whatchamacallit thing. That never really caught on, did it?
Doug gave a really good set of talks at Stanford (along with a few other luminaries like Nelson, Kay, etc) to celebrate 'Englebarts unfinished revolution' in about '98 or so. It was a *fabulous* day. Pretty much all my team from Interval Research were there. I still have my sticky 'hello my name is..' badge from the event.
I recall hearing that the projector used was a sort of inkjet that sprayed oil on a curved mirror/lens and was wiped off for each frame.
This was before anyone really even knew the word computer. Doug is still working on new stuff. Amazing. The wikipedia page on him is not completely rubbish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart)
"five-key whatchamacallit thing"
The general term is chorded keyboard. I thought an 8 or 10 key chorded keyboard spread across two mice would make an ideal 2D interface.
Wow, this is amazing. One demo that covers:
1. The mouse
2. Chorded keyboards
3. Hypertext/wiki-like system
4. Outliner system
5. Source provenance (cvs/svn annotate-like)
6. Domain-specific languages
7. Compiler compilers
8. Retained messages (email/comments)
9. Information annotation (annotate public documentions)
I think this is the paper he references around 75% through:
http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/researchcenter1968/ResearchCenter1968.html
Hang on a sec. In the video at 30:58, while diagramming the computer, storage, and display systems, he says "and the ARPA network coupling over here". This video was shot in December 1968. The ARPA contract wasn't until April 1969, and the first hookup wasn't until October of that year. What's he talking about?
This is amazing stuff. Is there a transcript of this talk anywhere?
If you had asked me to name the year just based on the topics I woulda been at least 10 years off on most of them.
Jeebus!
It was almost a spiritual experience =)
@2 The SR-71 program that began in 1960 had computers that could navigate a plane by the stars during daylight hours. Ever since I read that I've doubted very little from our freaking enormous defense(war) budget.
Blasphemous--did you notice they forget to credit Al Gore?? :]
John Markoff did a very nice job writing up this seminal event in his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said.
(One of the most fascinating aspects of that demo to me was the fact that they couldn't move their computers up to the demo hall in San Francisco so they reportedly ran their own radio links from Palo Alto all the way up the Peninsula.)
@5:
> I'm gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Hornswoggled.
If I still needed one, this would be a good reason to learn English. I love it. 8-D
Interestingly, the video was shot by none other than Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.
They got an interactive display at their desktops by pointing a TV camera at a computer-driven CRT in a rack and then piping the video feed to a TV at their desktop. Fascinating...
THX-1138-esque, almost...
This was at Xerox PARC, or what?
Very cool. I was only two years old at that time.
Does anyone have a higher resolution version of this video? Stanford Research Institute (SRI) has a DVD of this they publish; I know there's copies of that going around. But most people, including this Google Video, seem to be sourcing this 180px resolution version. Anyone have a better copy to share?
Holy. Crap. Thank you for this!
Holy cow. The very first application was a grocery list.
#6 Tim: Sounds kind of like you're describing an Eidophor. It's an obsolete video projection technology that was 80 times brighter than CRT projectors of the time.
Aha, yes, right near the end he identifies it as an Eidophor display.
If you are collecting astonishingly prescient demos, you should make room for Ivan Sutherland's computer-aided design program Sketchpad, running on the TX-2. I think there's a video of it somewhere on the Web. (rummage, rummage) Ah, here we go.
A short clip, narrated in hindsight by Alan Kay.
Sutherland's demo is included within a contemporary film about MIT Lincoln Labs: Part 1. Part 2. Thanks to Youtube user "bigkif!"
NerdTV 2005-12-09
Doug Engelbart invented computer networks, time sharing, graphical user interfaces, and the mouse--all while driving to work one day in 1951. Really.