![SRI Douglas Engelbart 1968](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/SRI_Douglas_Engelbart_1968.jpg)
"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the
Association for Computing Machinery /
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's
Fall Joint Computer Conference The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the omputerfield ...
in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
, by
Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968.
The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the
oN-Line System
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute ...
or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing:
windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
,
hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input,
video conferencing
Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...
, the
computer mouse
A computer mouse (plural mice, sometimes mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, which allows a smooth ...
, word processing,
dynamic file linking,
revision control
In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...
, and a
collaborative real-time editor
A collaborative real-time editor is a type of collaborative software or web application which enables real-time collaborative editing, simultaneous editing, or live editing of the same digital document, computer file or cloud-stored data – s ...
. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at
Xerox PARC
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
in the early 1970s. The underlying concepts and technologies influenced both the Apple
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
and
Microsoft Windows graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...
operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.
Etymology
The first use of this name for Engelbart's talk is ascribed to journalist
Steven Levy
Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book ...
in his 1994 book ''Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything'', where he describes the event as "a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos." The terminology reflected contemporary use of phrases of form "
mother of all ..." given currency by then-
President of Iraq
The president of Iraq is the head of state of Iraq and "safeguards the commitment to the Constitution and the preservation of Iraq's independence, sovereignty, unity, the security of its territories in accordance with the provisions of the Con ...
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein ( ; ar, صدام حسين, Ṣaddām Ḥusayn; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutio ...
's proffer of a "mother of all battles", in lead-up to the 1991
Gulf War
The Gulf War was a 1990–1991 armed campaign waged by a Coalition of the Gulf War, 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Ba'athist Iraq, ...
.
Andries van Dam (who was present at the demo, and whose
FRESS hypertext system adopted several concepts from the demo) repeated the phrase in 1995 while introducing Engelbart at the Vannevar Bush Symposium at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
. The phrase was also cited in
John Markoff's 2005 book ''
What the Dormouse Said''.
Background
Much of Engelbart's thought that led to the development of his
Augmentation Research Center (ARC), as well as the
oN-Line System
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute ...
, was derived from the "research culture" of World War II and the early Cold War. A notable source of inspiration to Engelbart was the article "
As We May Think", written by
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
in ''
The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
'' magazine, which Engelbart read while stationed as a US Navy radar technician in the Philippines in 1946. In Engelbart's view, in order to steer society into the right use of scientific knowledge derived from the war, that knowledge would need to be better managed and regulated.
In his book ''From Counterculture to Cyberculture'',
Fred Turner gave voice to this view, which arose from seeing the unintended effects of technology on the postwar world:
e American military had developed technologies with which it might destroy the world. In its wake, scientists and technologists had begun to fan out around the globe, seeking to use their knowledge to eradicate disease and increase food production, often in an effort to win the cold war loyalties of Third World nations. Engelbart had read about these efforts and saw that they often backfired. Rapid food production led to the depletion of the soil; the eradication of insects led to ecological imbalances.
This ultimately led to the idea that beyond merely performing calculations, computers could be used to augment the capabilities of the human mind.
Demonstration
![SRI Computer Mouse](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/SRI_Computer_Mouse.jpg)
Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers at his
Augmentation Research Center (ARC) located in Stanford University's
Stanford Research Institute
SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...
(SRI) in the early 1960s. His idea was to free computing from merely being about number crunching and for it to become a tool for communications and information-retrieval. He wanted to turn
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
's idea for a
Memex
Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of ...
machine into reality, where a machine used interactively by one person could "augment" their intelligence.
Over the course of six years, with the funding help of both
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...
and
ARPA, his team went about putting together all the elements that would make such a computer system a reality. At the urging of ARPA's director,
Robert Taylor, the NLS would make its first public appearance at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
's
Civic Auditorium.
The conference session was presented under the title ''A research center for augmenting human intellect''. Approximately 1,000 computer professionals were in attendance in the auditorium to witness the presentation. Notable attendees in the audience included
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...
,
Charles Irby and
Andy van Dam, as well as
Bob Sproull
Robert Fletcher "Bob" Sproull (born c. 1945) is an American computer scientist, who worked for Oracle Corporation where he was director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the College of Informa ...
.
Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team (including
Bill Paxton
William Paxton (May 17, 1955 – February 25, 2017) was an American actor and filmmaker. He appeared in films such as '' Weird Science'' (1985), ''Aliens'' (1986), '' Near Dark'' (1987), '' Tombstone'' (1993), ''True Lies'' (1994), '' Apollo 1 ...
), with
Bill English
Sir Simon William English (born 30 December 1961) is a New Zealand former National Party politician who served as the 39th prime minister of New Zealand from 2016 to 2017 and as the 17th deputy prime minister of New Zealand and minister of f ...
directing the presentation's technical elements, demonstrated NLS's functions. The presentation used an
Eidophor video projector that allowed the video output from the NLS computer to be displayed on a large high screen so the audience could see what Engelbart was doing.
The Augment researchers also created two customized homemade
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...
s at 1200
baudhigh-speed for 1968linked via a
leased line to transfer data from the computer workstation keyboard and mouse at the Civic Auditorium to their Menlo Park headquarters'
SDS-940 computer.
In order to provide live two-way video between the lab and the conference hall, two
microwave links were used. English also commanded a
video switcher
A vision mixer is a device used to select between several different live video sources and, in some cases, compositing live video sources together to create visual effects.
In most of the world, both the equipment and its operator are called ...
that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator in Menlo Park was
Stewart Brand—at the time, a non-computer person, best known as the editor of the ''
Whole Earth Catalog
The ''Whole Earth Catalog'' (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articl ...
''—who also advised Engelbart and the team about how to present the demo.
During the 90-minute presentation, Engelbart used his mouse prototype to move around the screen, highlight text, and resize windows. This was the first time that an integrated system for manipulating text onscreen was presented publicly.
At separate times, his Augment associates
Jeff Rulifson
Johns Frederick (Jeff) Rulifson (born August 20, 1941) is an American computer scientist.
Early life and education
Johns Frederick Rulifson was born August 20, 1941 in Bellefontaine, Ohio. His father was Erwin Charles Rulifson and mother was Virg ...
and
Bill Paxton
William Paxton (May 17, 1955 – February 25, 2017) was an American actor and filmmaker. He appeared in films such as '' Weird Science'' (1985), ''Aliens'' (1986), '' Near Dark'' (1987), '' Tombstone'' (1993), ''True Lies'' (1994), '' Apollo 1 ...
appeared in another portion of the screen to help edit the text remotely from ARC. While they were editing they could see each other's screen, talk and see each other as well. He further demonstrated that clicking on underlined text would then link to another page of information, demonstrating the concept of
hypertext.
When he finished the demonstration, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To further demonstrate the system, a separate room was set aside so that attendees could take a closer look at the NLS workstations and ask Engelbart questions. One last notion is that of Engelbart's NLS system. As Fred Turner stated in his book ''From Counterculture to Cyberculture'':
Engelbart promulgated a philosophy of 'bootstrapping', in which each experimental transformation of the socio-technical system that was the NLS would feed back into the system itself, causing it to evolve (and presumably to improve).
Influence
![Douglas Engelbart in 2008](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Douglas_Engelbart_in_2008.jpg)
Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot". When he was finished, he was described as "dealing lightning with both hands". Van Dam was working on a similar system, but had only begun work on it in 1967, and was stunned to see how mature NLS was: he practically accosted Engelbart with his line of questioning in the post-presentation question and answer session. After he finished interrogating Engelbart, van Dam agreed the NLS demo was the greatest thing he ever witnessed. Van Dam would go on to become a leader in teaching computer graphics in the 1970s.
[ACM SIGGRAPH: ]
Report on Andy van Dam
'' The actual impact on computer science, however, was limited:
As the 1970s started, much of Engelbart's team departed ARC and went their own ways, with many of them ending up at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Among these people were Bill English, who would further improve upon the
mouse. Also migrating to PARC was Engelbart's former backer at NASA and ARPA, Robert Taylor. Alan Kay, also in attendance at the demo, would go on to design an object-oriented computing environment called
Smalltalk while he was at PARC.
By 1973, the
Xerox Alto
The Xerox Alto is a computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market ...
was a fully functional personal computer similar to the NLS terminal which Engelbart had demonstrated in 1968, but much smaller and physically refined. With its mouse-driven GUI, the Alto would go on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple's Macintosh computer and operating system in the 1980s. Eventually, Microsoft's Windows operating system would follow the Macintosh and use a multi-button mouse like the Alto and the NLS system did.
Engelbart's influence peaked at the conference, and he was mostly remembered throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s as the inventor of the mouse and hypertext, famously adapted by Apple and Microsoft. On the demo's 30th anniversary in 1998, Stanford University held a major conference to celebrate Engelbart's visionary impact on computing and the World Wide Web. By the time the 40th anniversary was celebrated, Engelbart's demo was acknowledged as one of the most important in computer history.
In 2015, a
performance art
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
musical presentation called ''The Demo'' depicted the event. It was composed and performed by
Mikel Rouse and
Ben Neill, with its premiere at Stanford's
Bing Concert Hall.
See also
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References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
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External links
* – comprehensive portal page maintained by the Doug Engelbart Institute with links to annotated video footage at various sites, retrospectives, photos, conference proceedings, program, tribute sites, etc.
* , includes background, links, archival reports and papers, oral history, etc.; previously included streaming video of the demo in full, and in annotated clips
* Commemorative Events: , , and .
* Documentary about Doug Engelbart.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mother of All Demos
1968 in California
1968 speeches
events in California
history of computing hardware
history of human–computer interaction
history of San Francisco
science and technology in the San Francisco Bay Area
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