The Mother of All Demos
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"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the
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/
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(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 language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, 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 List of Ca ...
, by
Douglas Engelbart Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...
, 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 (S ...
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 serv ...
,
hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
, 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 and video signals by people in different locations for real time communication.McGraw-Hill Concise Ency ...
, 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 c ...
, 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 – suc ...
. 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., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
and
Microsoft 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 serv ...
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, inste ...
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 revolution ...
'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 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: ...
.
Andries van Dam Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hyper ...
(who was present at the demo, and whose
FRESS The File Retrieval and Editing SyStem, or FRESS, was a hypertext system developed at Brown University starting in 1968 by Andries van Dam and his students, including Bob Wallace. It was the first hypertext system to run on readily available comm ...
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 John Gregory Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at ''The New York Times'' for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture ...
's 2005 book ''
What the Dormouse Said ''What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry'', is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaborat ...
''.


Background

Much of Engelbart's thought that led to the development of his
Augmentation Research Center SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come ...
(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 (S ...
, 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 "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...
", 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 wartime ...
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

Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers at his
Augmentation Research Center SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come ...
(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 d ...
(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 wartime ...
'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 agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
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 language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, 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 List of Ca ...
'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 Charles H. Irby was a software architect on SRI International's oN-Line System (NLS), where he worked to establish many of the user interface standards that exist today. He also led the design group for the Xerox Star. He co-founded Metaphor Com ...
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 Informat ...
. 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 13 ...
), 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 An Eidophor was a video projector used to create theater-sized images from an analog video signal. The name Eidophor is derived from the Greek word-roots ''eido'' and ''phor'' meaning 'image' and 'bearer' (carrier). Its basic technology was th ...
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
baud In telecommunication and electronics, baud (; symbol: Bd) is a common unit of measurement of symbol rate, which is one of the components that determine the speed of communication over a data channel. It is the unit for symbol rate or modulatio ...
high-speed for 1968linked via a
leased line A leased line is a private telecommunications circuit between two or more locations provided according to a commercial contract. It is sometimes also known as a private circuit, and as a data line in the UK. Typically, leased lines are used by ...
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 link Microwave transmission is the transmission of information by electromagnetic waves with wavelengths in the microwave frequency range of 300MHz to 300GHz(1 m - 1 mm wavelength) of the electromagnetic spectrum. Microwave signals are normally lim ...
s 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 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the ''Whole Earth Catalog''. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the auth ...
—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 A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of ...
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 13 ...
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 Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
. 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

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 A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...
. 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 Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
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 G ...
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 Mikel Rouse (born Michael Rouse; January 26, 1957 in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States) is an American composer. He has been associated with a Downtown New York City movement known as totalism, and is best known for his operas, including '' ...
and Ben Neill, with its premiere at Stanford's Bing Concert Hall.


See also

*


References


Notes


Citations


Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


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 SRI International