Douglas Engelbart
loreprogrammingops culture
The engineer who demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, windows, word processing and video conferencing in a single session on 9 December 1968 - the presentation now called the Mother of All Demos.
The audience of professionals had never seen a cursor moved by a hand, and the machine driving it sat twenty-five miles away. Almost everything in that ninety minutes is now furniture, which is the strange part: the demonstration is more famous than any product he shipped. His stated aim was not convenience but augmentation - computers as tools for people to handle problems too complex to hold in one head - and he had written that argument down years before he had the hardware to show it. The Turing Award reached him in 1997, twenty-nine years after the demonstration.
Also known as: engelbart, mother of all demos, nls
Sources
- Lemelson-MIT on Douglas Engelbart: the 1968 demonstration of the mouse, hypermedia and shared-screen teleconferencing, to 2,000 professionals who had never seen a mouse move a cursor
- The Mother of All Demos, 9 December 1968: NLS, the mouse, bitmapped screens, word processing and hypertext in one session
- Britannica - Douglas Engelbart: born 30 January 1925, died 2 July 2013, and recipient of the 1997 Turing Award