On December 9, 1968, a brilliant engineer took the stage of the auditorium of San Francisco and in exactly 90 minutes he told everything that would happen in our lives afterwards. How Personal Computers and the Internet Would Change Our Lives. Except that personal computers did not yet exist. And not only was there not even a name of the Internet, but not even the first connection, the first node of the Network of networks, which would arrive 10 months later. That presentation years later was considered so visionary and complete as to be renamed “the Mother of all Demos”, the mother of all presentations.
The young engineer was called Douglas Engelbart and you probably know him as the father of the mouse, but he was much more: he died in 2013 and that December 9 he was 43 years old. It is said that in 1945 he was struck by the reading a legendary text, As We May Think, di Vannevar Bush; and that it was for the book that he decided that in life he would try to make the world a better place and that to do so he would need to put together as many intelligences as possible and that the computer (not yet personal) could be the tool to do so . And so in the 1960s, in Menlo Park, with the support of SRI (a research institute at Stanford University), he had created the Augmentation Research Center, a laboratory where we could study how computers could increase our capabilities.
The results of that research were presented on December 9, 1968 in San Francisco. There were about 1000 people waiting for Engelbart’s presentation that day, title: A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect. Instead of speaking from the podium, Engelbart stood in front of a console from which he commanded the presentation which was on a computer 50 kilometers away. This it was possible thanks to the Nls, the oN-Line System, developed by Engelbart with funds from the government agency Arpa (the same that was financing the birth of the Internet). In the 90 minutes that followed, the basic concepts of the mouse, windows on screens and hypertext were anticipated, and then video conferences, software for writing texts and collaborating remotely. It was the future as no one had ever told it before. When the presentation ended there was a standing ovation, all standing to clap.
Many years later, recounting the birth of Apple in a book, reporter Steven Levy recounted that moment calling it “the Mother of All Demos” for the first time. It was 1994 and the expression “the mother of all battles”, referring to a Gulf war against Saddam Hussein, entered the American lexicon. Since then, December 9 has been remembered in this way. there is also a site with this name where you can watch the videos divided into convenient clips, the photos, the considerations of the protagonists. And on the occasion of the 30, 40 and 50 years there were real celebrations, as well as a musical, a cartoon and several exhibitions. Many famous phrases are remembered about him, such as “the digital revolution is much more important than the invention of writing and printing.” More generally, many agree that without that presentation, without those intuitions, neither Apple nor Microsoft would be born.
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