The Mother of All Demos

It is the 50th Anniversary on Sunday of a demo that took place on December 9th 1968. It would go on to become known as "The Mother of All Demos" because it changed people's conception of what computers could do and set the agenda for much of computer science going forward. Somewhat surprisingly, when you consider the date, a complete video recording of the event exists. I'll include it at the end of this post.

During the nearly two hour demo, Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) gave a demonstration of NLS, the oNLine System. The demo included a few concepts that had been prototyped in other systems, but most that were completely new. What was really unprecedented was to put them all together into a single system, and have everything work together more smoothly than many systems do even today.

The World Changes

At the beginning of the demo, expectations were low since Doug was regarded as very eccentric. Two hours later, computer science had an agenda that would inspire it and occupy it for decades. Arguably, only now has the full implementation of those ideas spread around the world in the form of the smartphone.

The Demo

So what were the features that Doug showed? Well, you can pretty much take everything that you can think of that is now common in a graphical user interface (GUI), and it was there:

• the first mouse (that's it on the right)
• text and graphics...on the same screen
• the screen divided into separate windows
• WYSIWYG graphical text editing
• linked hypertext, what in this internet era we just call "links"
• on-screen video-conferencing
• revision control
• collaborative editing with more than one person editing the same document
• dynamic linking
• context-sensitive help

Don't forget just how early 1968 was. Computing was basically all done on mainframes using punched cards and line-printers. Not only had Steve Jobs not made his famous visit to Xerox PARC, PARC would not be founded for a couple more years in 1970 (and Jobs was only 13 when the demo took place). The Apple Mac would not debut for 16 more years in 1984. Microsoft Windows 3 (the first real version) for 22 more years in 1990. The iPhone came along almost 40 years later in 2007. But if you look at the big picture, you can see the thread that runs through all that development, and it started for most people when that demo changed the world, probably more than all the other famous events that 1968 is famous for outside of tech.

I started to learn to program in 1968, but on mainframes. I was even blown away when, in about 1971, I first saw (and then got to use) an interactive terminal printing at 10 characters per second. I didn't see a mouse until I visited PARC myself while I was doing my PhD in the late 1970s. It is hard even for me to put myself in the shoes of the people watching that demo, seeing Doug manipulate the cursor with a mouse the way we do today, seeing text updated as he typed. For younger people who grew up with hand-held Nintendo Gameboys, or with a PC in the house, it is impossible.

One aspect of the demo that I don't think we can be so thankful for was described almost ten years ago in Wired Magazine:

What's more, it was likely the first appearance of computer-generated slides, complete with bullet lists and Engelbart reading aloud every word onscreen. 

I'm sure none of us have ever experienced that (or been guilty of it!) in the 50 years since.

Presenting the Demo

Above is the announcement of the event. The hardware setup was, in some ways, amazingly advanced, and in others really primitive. The computers were back at SRI's headquarters in Menlo Park with a team of engineers. There were a microwave link and two high-speed (for the time) unidirectional 1200 baud modems that they had also had to build themselves since modems that "fast" didn't exist. There was a separate video feed, and systems for switching what the audience saw between the feeds. There had been a general expectation among the engineers that something would fail totally in the precarious setup, but everything worked perfectly.

The demo took place at the Fall Joint Computer Conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society in San Francisco, in the Convention Center. No, not the Moscone Center, that wouldn't be opened for another 13 years (and Moscone wouldn't be Mayor for another 8 years). It was in Brooks Hall which was underneath that plaza in front of city hall, also known as Mole Hall since it was entirely underground (I guess the Moscone Center half learned from that, since it is only half underground).

About 1000 people saw the demo live, including several names who would go on to be famous at places like PARC. Beforehand, people's expectations were low.

Bill  Paxton, one of the SRI researchers who worked with Engelbart and participated in the demo, said:

90 per cent of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot." It's hard to believe now but at the time, even we fellow researchers had trouble understanding what he was doing. Think of everyone else out there.

But one who did understand was Alan Kay, who was present at the demo, would go on to PARC (and be the inventor of many of the ideas in object-oriented programming) said:

I was shivering like mad, with a 104 degree fever. But I was determined to see it.

Another person there was Andries van Dam. If you ever studied computer graphics, especially in the 1980s or 90s, you probably had "Foley and van Dam" as your textbook. He had started work on a similar system a year before, and so was amazed at how far Engelbart had got, and asked many questions during the Q&A. But, as John Markoff said in his book What the Dormouse Said?:

After he finished interrogating Engelbart, van Dam agreed the NLS demo was the greatest thing he ever witnessed.

Doug Engelbart was the recipient of the Turing Award in 1997, the nearest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize. He died in 2013.

Find Out More

Just Google "the mother of all demos". It's not just some joke name among the in-crowd. It has a Wikipedia page The Mother of All Demos, although weirdly, despite being just about the most famous demo of all time, the fact that it took place at all is listed as^{[citation needed]}.

I just discovered that the Computer History Museum has an event this coming Wednesday, Solving Today's Great Problems? Lessons from Engelbart's Demo @50.

The Video

Note: this video does have sound, but there is none right at the beginning. The video is 1 hour 45 minutes long, so get yourself a coffee.

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