Forty-five years ago today, a man sat down in front of a computer, and began a technology demonstration that was so powerful, that it resonates today. Doug Englebart, of the Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, and his team began a ninety-minute audio-visual presentation of their greatest work, the oN-Line System, or NLS.
NLS encompassed a number of then-revolutionary technologies, including the world debut of the humble pointing device that still adorns our desks – the mouse. Many people know the story of Steve Jobs and his band of Apple pirates storming Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, and walking away with licenses to the mouse and Xerox’s graphical user interface. Fewer people know that both go back a decade more to Englebart’s ARC team, and this presentation that has become known as The Mother of all Demos.
Englebart also demonstrated a number of other features of the NLS, many of which were not widely used until decades later. These include multi-window interfaces, hypertext, WYSIWYG word processing, object addressing, dynamic file linking, video conferencing, graphics, revision control, and shared-screen collaborative editing.
This presentation was the realization of Englebart’s dream to make computing about more than just crunching numbers and conducting complicated, repetitive calculations over large data sets, and to make computers powerful tools that allow people to communicate, collaborate, and create. He wanted to build a device that would allow people to retrieve all manner of information.
Looking at where we are today, I’d say he succeeded.
But the most astonishing part of this was when this demonstration took place: December 9, 1968. Before smartphones and personal computers, before websites and the Internet. Before cellphones were invented. Before Gates, Jobs, and Woz turned a hobby into a real industry. It would be nearly eleven months before the first four nodes of ARPANET were connected and transmitting. It would be another seven months before the astronauts of Apollo 11 made another kind of history.
We stand at the threshold of another revolution in computing. Today, we speak of wearable computing with the same disdain we spoke of smartphones seven years ago, and cell phones fifteen years ago. If history is any indication, wearable devices will be ubiquitous within a decade. The computer power-per-person will be unbelievable – look at the explosive leaps in processing power each generation of mobile device makes over the previous generation.Time will tell if we will become a pacified crowd of content consumers, or if we will create something new with these devices.
Whatever happens, and whatever form the future takes, we would not be standing here, now, without the incredible work of Doug Englebart and his team.
You can read more about Doug Englebart’s demonstration, and even view video of the presentation at Stanford’s MouseSite
the anamorphic man 