Part 1: The Future Revealed
A mild-mannered engineer stands onstage at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. A massive video screen looms behind him, displaying a close-up of his face in the lower right half of the screen, with a close-up of his computer display superimposed over his face to the left. Introducing his team, he sounds a bit nervous, saying, “If every one of us does our job well, it’ll all go very interesting, I think.”
He starts by typing text, and then copying and pasting the word “word” multiple times, first a few lines, then paragraphs. He cuts and pastes blocks of text. He makes a shopping list his wife has requested — bananas, soup, paper towels — creating numbered lists, categories and subcategories, using his cursor to move around the document. Narrating as he works, he sounds not unlike Rod Serling. When he makes the occasional self-deprecating joke, we hear genial laughter from the audience.
Today, this presentation would be completely unremarkable. But it’s not 2018 — it’s December 9, 1968. The engineer is Douglas C. Engelbart, founder of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, and nobody in his audience — or in the history of the world — has ever seen anything like it before.
Over the course of the next 90 minutes, seated at a workstation custom-designed by the research division of Herman Miller and supported by a team of programmers, engineers, and audiovisual technicians, Engelbart introduces the world to the oN-Line System (or NLS) his team has invented. Using the newly invented mouse and keyboard, he demonstrates all the things it can do, things we today take for granted as the necessary tools of everyday work and play: word processing, hypertext and linking, windows, view control, collaborative working, revision tracking — basically, the entire world-to-come of networked personal computing.
As I sit in my living room, typing this essay on my laptop, it is difficult to conceive just how radical a proposal this was. According to tech writer John Markoff, in his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, for the people gathered in the room that day, “[t]he relationship between man and computer had been turned upside down.”
So how is it that so few people outside of the tech sector have heard of Douglas Engelbart, except possibly — and reductively — as the inventor of the mouse? How could the man at the center of what has been retroactively dubbed “The Mother of All Demos” have fallen into such obscurity?