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1968 “Mother of All Demos” by SRI’s Doug Engelbart and Team

SRI · 302.6K views · 2018-12-07 · 5:36

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Overview

Highlights from Doug Engelbart's December 1968 demonstration at SRI, the first public showing of the mouse, hypertext, windows, real-time collaborative editing and shared-screen teleconferencing. This is a roughly six-minute condensed version of the full demo.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the go-to reference for how many modern computing ideas, collaboration included, were demonstrated in 1968.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2020–2024

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computing
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engelbartmother of all demosmousehypertextcollaborative editing

What people said

skibz · 2024-11 · Reference

I don't think I have the skill to learn a stenographer's keyboard, but I would love to have a small chorded keyboard just for macros. I always liked the look of Doug Engelbart's one in the Mother of All Demos. It's very basic, but I'd be quite satisfied with something like that today. He demonstrates it at about 1:40: [VIDEO]

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GeekyBear · 2023-01 · Reference

People always seem to forget that Xerox borrowed a lot of ideas themselves. Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute gets credit for many innovations, including the mouse. The infamous "mother of all demos" can be seen here: [VIDEO] Going back to the early 60's, there was an equally famous GUI demonstration at MIT, using a light pen instead of a mouse as a user input device for rudimentary CAD. [LINK] Finally, anybody who claims that the Mac or Windows was nothing but a copy of the Alto has never seen an Alto in action. [LINK]

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twobitshifter · 2021-08 · Reference

See Englebart’s mother of all demos. I think he had everything in your first couple paragraphs working in 1968! [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by SRI, played through YouTube.

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