The Mother of All Demos

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I came across this today and it was simply fascinating. For those of us who work and present on technology what is presented is essentially the birth of the “Demo” along with the beginnings of what we might equate as a “webinar”. More amazing is that this was done  45 years ago  by Douglas Engelbart and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The number of concepts presented in this piece are pretty astonishing: the keyboard and mouse, bootstrapping, hyper links, the fledgling internet, etc. all presented by Mr. Englebart and his supporting cast of dozens.What I do today in my home office presenting to customers and partners took a team of around 30 people to do 45 years ago with countless man hours dedicated to simply capturing a demonstration of technology we all take for granted today.

I wonder if at the time, this team understood exactly what they had hit upon, and that what they were presenting would be the foundation for how user interactions with compute platforms would be normalized over the next 45 years.

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