Saturday, February 21, 2009

The "Mother of All Demos": December 9, 1968

My friend Tom passed along this link to what may be the greatest demoing of hardware and software in the computer industry.  If you think that interactive, collaborative, mouse-driven, networked, hypertext linked, teleconferencing and electronic whiteboards are new, take a look at these excerpts from Douglas Engelbart's demo of the system that was being developed in 1968.

Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing

The excerpts require that you have QuickTime installed.  You can also visit the Stanford University MouseSite to view the full demo as a stream or as Flash clips.

Everything old is new again. Or is it that everything new is really old.

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