
Doug Engelbart's advice to a young software developer [video] - DonHopkins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA
======
jdonaldson
I once was in Manhattan with Dr. Engelbart during the NIME conference (New
Interfaces for Musical Expression). We were riding the subway together. I
think he must've seen the poster (presentation) I was carrying and we struck
up a conversation. It ranged over all kinds of topics: ergonomics,
performance/audience interpretation, mechanical vs. gestural control, etc. I
remember us being pretty sharply critical over each other's ideas, and just
being skeptical of "good" solutions in general for the problems of modern
musical control.

Of course, I didn't realize who he was at the time. I only had seen grainy old
videos of him from decades ago. I'm really glad I didn't recognize his face at
first. You see, he had always been a huge hero of mine, and a big motivation
for me to go to grad school. For a brief moment, we got to argue over small
technical details as if we were any old pair of jaded researchers. It was a
totally normal exchange in any other context, and a highlight in hindsight.

------
DonHopkins
I found this incredibly interesting stuff on Valerie Landau's youtube channel
of Douglass Engelbart, her mentor. The videos have apparently been viewed only
a few times, but they deserve much more attention, because the ideas presented
are so important and relevant today!

She was a long time friend and collaborator with Doug Engelbart, and she was
responsible for transferring the 1968 film of The Mother of All Demos from
film to video so it could be preserved. She tracked him down and interviewed
him, and after airing the interview, he asked her to help him articulate his
vision to share with the world, which she's been working on since then.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/islandeweller/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/islandeweller/videos)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Landau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Landau)

Valerie Landau is an American designer, author and educator. She serves as
Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University where she designed a
software application that facilitates analysis and assessment of how
effectively an organization is meeting their goals and objectives at course,
program and institutional levels.

She has filed two patents along with her colleague and mentor Douglas
Engelbart. Their most recent patent (filed April 2010) describes multitouch
interface for chorded text entry. The new patent is inspired by Engelbart's
early work developing the Chorded keyboard. They also released an application
for the iPhone for chorded texting called "TipTapSpeech".

Engelbart and Landau also collaborated on writing the book "The Engelbart
Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart" along with co-author Eileen Clegg.

Landau is also a co-founder of Program for the Future, a non-profit
organization that promotes Engelbart's vision of Collective Intelligence. She
also is author of the seminal book on online education "Developing an
Effective Online Course" and earned the "Online Pioneer" award.

Landau, also known for her work in multimedia at Round World Media and for her
work mentoring students in a three-year project studying and applying the
Engelbart Hypothesis. and created an online archive of Engelbart related
events and videos.

She is an instructional and interaction designer and has worked on many award-
winning projects, educational games and online courses.

In addition, she leads high level research delegations to Cuba.

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA)

\----

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-
inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text
input.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8)

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a
two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every
combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I,
JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

\----

Engelbart Using HandWriter. Douglas Engelbart demonstrates early prototype of
The HandWriter with Valerie Landau.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5wAD2aji3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5wAD2aji3Q)

Q: So whose ideas was the glove?

Engelbart: I invented actually a separate keyset with the five keys, and her
idea, you can make a glove to do that.

Q: And what's the advantage of using a five key chording system?

Engelbart: Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in
parallel, doing things that take character input.

And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters,
too.

Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick
on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word.

Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace
character, replace word, transpose words.

All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right
hand doing it.

\----

iChord: Clips from video of Eric Matsuno & Valerie Landau showing their new
iPhone app to Douglas Engelbart. To Douglas C Engelbart and Bill English, and
to Karen Engelbart, Roberta English and Mary Coppernoll. Present in spirit but
not in molecules were: Evan Schaffer and Dr. Robert Stephenson.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XXdnu5n9vI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XXdnu5n9vI)

So we're going to be able to be configurable for whoever's hand. [...] Go
ahead and give it a try: so swiping it down puts it in the history, and
swiping it left takes the last ...

\----

Andres Types His Name

Andres writing his name on TipTap late on a Saturday night. I arrived home
after a party and found him typing on TipTapSpeech.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WI88q7coEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WI88q7coEY)

\----

This final silent video is chock full of photos and memories of Douglass
Engelbart's friends and family, drawings, whiteboards, posters and
brainstorming sessions!

Memories with Douglas Engelbart: Photos from my work with Douglas Engelbart
creating a Educational Networked Improvement Community Engelbart and working
with Eileen Clegg on the writing of the book the Engelbart Hypothesis:
Diaglogs with Douglas Engelbart.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnsWKikS_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnsWKikS_w)

\----

~~~
pvg
This is indeed all really interesting but it looks like you've posted a video
from a blog post about this and then dumped the blog post in a bunch of HN
thread comments instead of an actual blog post.

~~~
DonHopkins
I'll write a blog post about it soon, but I was hoping to benefit from other
people's comments and links from discussing it here first. (You could accuse
me of "crowd sourcing" my blog post, but I'd like to think of it as applying
collective intelligence! ;) )

"The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be
dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed."
-Douglass Engelbart, Intelligence in the Internet Age, New York Times, 9/19/05

[https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/great-doug-
eng...](https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/great-doug-engelbart-
quotes/)

Or as the great philosopher Linda Richman said:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw&feature=youtu.be&t=5m28s)

~~~
pvg
Sure but taking over the entire discussion thread still looks like an abuse of
the site, however on-topic and well-intentioned. You can just post a link to
the draft you want people to chime in on.

~~~
dang
In general you have a point but Don's enthusiasm is an international resource.
Let's not hold it against him.

One goes to the internet with the DonHopkins one has.

~~~
pvg
I'm not holding it against him. I enjoy reading this stuff. But if the purpose
of the comments section is conversation, this is a completely bananas way to
have a conversation.

~~~
DonHopkins
If you like bananas, you'll LOVE watching Baxter the Chimpanzee Erase the
Voting Log: ;)

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/dumbold-voting-machine-for-
th...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the-
sims-1-3e76f394452c#01c2)

~~~
pvg
Although, since you're on the line, I have a question about your last post. In
all the research and measurement that's gone into pie menus, have people
looked into 'exploratory pointing' in pie menus? It's very common when looking
through a linear menu with a mouse (many people also do it with text selection
while reading) but it's super clunky and jittery in the actual pie menus I've
seen in the wild.

~~~
DonHopkins
Great question and observation!

I'm not sure this is exactly what you're getting at, but it's related:

One of Ted Selker's students at MIT Media Lab came up with an idea of (normal
linear) menus that "second guess" the user's favorite item, by measuring how
much time they spend in each item, and guess their second favorite choice as
the non-selected item they spent the most time pointing at.

I thought it was such an insidiously simple yet evil idea that I had to try
implementing it with pie menus.

This video shows the Internet Explorer JavaScript ActiveX Behavior control
running in Internet Explorer version 5. (Please excuse the ugly HTML and XML
and XSLT!)

At 4:25 there's a demo of "Pie Menu Second Choice Guessing". The basic idea
could be applied to any menus, but you're right that people tend to browse
around menus by pointing at the items, and that definitely applies to pie
menus.

But with linear menu, once you've browsed down to the bottom item, you've gone
a long way in the same direction, so you're far away from the first item, and
have to move back up to select it.

But with pie menus, you only go a little way in each direction, which cancels
out and brings you back to where you started, and you stay near the center
adjacent to all the items, so it's easy to change your mind and reselect any
item without moving your mouse very far.

In other computer science words: Linear menus are O(n), while pie menus are
O(1).

JavaScript Pie Menus: Pie menus for JavaScript on Internet Explorer version 5,
configured in XML, rendered with dynamic HTML, by Don Hopkins.

[https://youtu.be/R5k4gJK-aWw?t=4m25s](https://youtu.be/R5k4gJK-aWw?t=4m25s)

>This was inspired by some research at MIT Media Labs. This is a demonstration
of pie menus that try to guess what your second choice would be. So when I
click up, it allows me to select my favorite color. Let me zoom in here. Well,
I think it's blue... No, red! Ok. So it says: "I think your favorite color is
red, but I guess your second favorite color is blue." And that's based on the
fact that when I popped it up, even though I selected red, I spent the most
time selecting blue. People tend to browse pie menus like this, looking at
things, and when they find what they like, they click it, but then they'll
pause to consider things. So I can click up the menu and go: Yellow? Oh, no.
I'll just cancel it. And now it's guessing that my favorite color is yellow,
even though I didn't select one. This is a simple elegant idea that I applied
to pie menus, and it could be applied to a lot of other things, and used for
e-commerce and art galleries or whatever.

If you're not living in 1999, you might prefer the jQuery pie menus that run
in any browser. You could easily implement the "second choice" feature without
modifying the code by using tracking callbacks, which are all documented here:

[http://www.donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/JQuery_Pie_Men...](http://www.donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/JQuery_Pie_Menus)

And here's the source code:

[https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie](https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-
pie)

I don't know what other menu implementations give you callbacks for changing
the selected item before you select one, as well as continuous pointer
tracking (passing the current item, direction and distance), but pie menus
definitely should.

Callbacks like that are very useful for researchers evaluating and comparing
menu performance. And also for developers, who can provide nice application
specific feedback in the menu or on the page.

Callbacks can use the distance as a parameter, for selecting between multiple
items in the slice, or pulling out a continuous value like a "slider",
changing the font size, selecting a hue and saturation with direction and
distance (with an outer ring you can dip into to set the brightness), etc.

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*ngAv4gwWUcFCfQeJ.g...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*ngAv4gwWUcFCfQeJ.gif)

I hate jQuery as much as the next person, so I'm sorry I haven't implemented
them in a trendier more modern framework yet, but I'm having a hard time
deciding which one, and they all seem to either suck or not have a very big
following. I'm open to suggestions!

It's even better for menus to display more information during browsing when
you point at each item (including for disabled items, telling you WHY they're
disabled and WHAT to do to enable them, instead of mysteriously ignoring you
and not selecting), and hide (or shrink or make translucent) unselected items,
so you don't have to put so much cluttered distracting information about every
item on the screen at the same time.

These PyGTK SimCity pie menus show icons only (which correspond to the icons
on the tool pallet), but show titles when you point at them, and a description
of the menu when it pops up and nothing is selected, along the bottom of the
menu.

SimCity Tools Static Pie Menu with “Build” Selected:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*-x3kctcC1nbZeT9H.p...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*-x3kctcC1nbZeT9H.png)

SimCity Build Static Pie Menu with “Park” Selected:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*I6jUSzJFSTeiJ_38.p...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*I6jUSzJFSTeiJ_38.png)

------
jsutton
The key takeaway for me: "Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make
everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are
going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one
will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so
that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

------
DonHopkins
Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA)

Q: Some people will have to change their normal method of thinking?

A: I think today, Aday really summed it up, that one of the things about
collective intelligence means that we really have to start looking at ways
that we can collectively share knowledge. And one of the problems with that is
there are no good tools for sharing massive quantities of knowledge. So it's
very hard to stay on top of things. So Doug's methodology creates maps and new
ways of displaying data that we have not explored. So that we can really see
large amounts of data, large amounts of knowledge, put them into structured
arguments, so what he means by structure -- and maps, so that people can
literally see what exists now and create very rapidly stragies -- both long
term strategic planning, as well as tactical planning -- to address the issues
that are confronting us.

Q: Does this assume that if people have the same information they'll all come
to the same conclusions?

A: No, not at all. What it means that you will be able to look at data and
make intelligent conclusions based on the best data we have currently. Because
right now there is a lot of good data that is currently not available to the
people who are making the decisions. He was saying that this was a dynamic
knowledge repository and it was about allowing people to have an intelligence
quotient. In other words, he saud that the infrastructure that you have to
support a society determines the capability of that society. Just because we
have all these capable tools doesn't necessarily mean that we'll behave
intelligently, but it does allow us the chance to behave intelligently. So by
improving our infrastructure, we're improving our intelligence QUOTIENT, not
our actual intelligence. Just like the same people who are intelligent
sometimes make bad choices, even though they're capable of making a better
choice.

Q: Now you say that Doug was interested in solving the most urgent problems of
humanity. What type of problems was he referring to?

A: He was definitely referring to things like Global Warming, issues around
water, food, hunger, war, corruption was very high on Doug's list. He also
followed very closely the work of the Millinenium Project, and so often times
he would cite whatever they had cited. He would often cite those same issues.

Q: Do you think his vision was going to become a reality at some point?

A: I think yes, if I didn't I don't think I would have spend the last 30 years
following it.

Q: What did you find most impressive about him as a person?

A: His humility. He was such a humble man, and his steadfastness of keeping
his vision. Often times leaders like Doug, who many people call a prophet...
In our society, we tend to think of the leaders as these sort of charismatic,
ambitious people, and I think that Doug really broke that mold, in that he was
a very humble, really shy person.

Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish
up. Or a good anecdote?

A: I think -- I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And
this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the
90's. And I said, Doug, Doug, I'm just started to get involved with software
development, and we have this really cool tool we're working on. Do you have
any advice, about ... for a young software developer. He looked at me and
said:

"Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as
module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to
endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and
which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those
pieces can carry on and move forward."

------
DonHopkins
I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that
functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

[https://www.tapwithus.com/](https://www.tapwithus.com/)

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like
a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she
hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so
you can look at the code to see how it works:

[https://github.com/TapWithUs](https://github.com/TapWithUs)

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in
VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable
pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the
same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a
mouse and a chorded keyboard:

>"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing
things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave
you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you
want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would
be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over
there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you
could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train
you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or
something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible
messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different
silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer
to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

~~~
hoodoof
I love the weird, awkward social situations in the video at the tapwithus
website, featuring people interacting with the tap keyboard secretly while
they are talking to other people - magnificently strange.

The police _will_ arrest you for wearing brass knuckles if you are caught
using this device.

This seems to be capturing finger movements that would otherwise map to a
keyboard. I wonder if there is an even more optimal way to capture finger
movements and map them to input, if the idea of mapping to keyboard finger
movements is discarded.

~~~
tapwithus
Hey! The Tap is made with soft-touch TPU and it looks more like rings than
brass knuckles. If an officer did ask to see it, they would be more interested
than concerned.

~~~
DonHopkins
I'd be interested to know more about the background and history of your
company and its founders, please?

And what's on the roadmap -- any plans for tactile feedback?

Are they available and shipping now? Do you ship to Europe?

Thanks for dropping by!

Did you know there used to be a magazine named Tap? And have you seen the
movie "The President's Analyst?" ;) I bet the Woz would love to play around
with one!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNv8m2Gl3Ec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNv8m2Gl3Ec)

------
rmason
I met Dr. Engelbart at a conference in the mid-nineties. A totally fascinating
individual with lots of great stories. Although our interaction was brief you
couldn't help becoming convinced he was totally motivated by his sincere
desire to make the world a better place.

What has often baffled me is that the poor man spent the last twenty five
years of his life looking for funding with neither the government or Valley
companies willing to support him. Hard to imagine what else he might have
created.

~~~
teddyh
As I understand it, he _did_ get a lot of funding for a while, but nothing
much came of it. After that happens, further funding tends to dry up.

For futher reading, see The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer
scientist (1982) by Jacques Vallée, chapter 5, “ _Knowledge Workers of the
World, link up!_ ”:
([https://books.google.nl/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA97](https://books.google.nl/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA97))

It contains a partial and anonymized (all names have been changed) story about
the initial decline of SRI, the company led by Engelbart to develop NLS.
Reportedly, they all became entranced with Erhard Seminars Training.

------
DonHopkins
Valerie Landau recommends this web site about Douglass Engelbart's life and
work, with chapters from her book:

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

[https://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/](https://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/)

Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg spent years in dialog with Douglas Engelbart
and wrote a book distilling those dialogs. It is available as on ebook on
Amazon

In addition, the book chapters are on this blog.

Today, we invite you to share your thoughts and memories of Douglas Engelbart
who passed away last night.

Add your stories to the Remembrances: Doug Engelbart page

\----

The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart

[https://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-Dialogs-
eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/The-Engelbart-Hypothesis-Dialogs-
ebook/dp/B003MAK5E6/ref=sr_1_cc_1)

Centuries of silo thinking and win-or-die ideological and economic competition
have finally generated a global crisis. Now either we collaborate on a global
scale to solve the new global problems, or we won't survive. The technology is
available to do so. Billions of intelligences are waiting to participate. How
do we bring the two together? We are at a decision crossroads. And as this
book vividly demonstrates, Doug Engelbart as been there all along, waiting for
us with the answer.

Emmy-Award Winning Historian James Burke --Email to the authors

------
doomlaser
_Modular_ : good advice. Look at a game like Doom, which survives and thrives
to this day because of the open documented WAD format.

Another example is Unity. Despite some of its own shortcomings, the developers
made a very open plugin system, and fantastic tools have been developed and
integrated into the Unity IDE that fix some of these problems and give it huge
amounts of power: ProBuilder (the in-IDE mesh editor) and TextMeshPro (the
font dynamic texture system) being two great examples.

Or, think of iOS without the app store, or any OS without third party
applications. What's the Lao Tsu saying? _Cut doors and windows for a room; It
is the holes which make it useful_ , etc

~~~
gonzo41
And look at eclipse, modular as all hell and everyone hates it. ;)

~~~
DonHopkins
And of course there's X-Windows: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15035419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15035419)

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d39...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d398ebd47)

X-Windows will never die, they'll just keep trying to fix it! (Just like the
cute little baby in Eraserhead.)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-
kI4Qzj9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-kI4Qzj9U)

~~~
doomlaser
I learned to write X-Windows UI code ages ago, and the boilerplate required to
do simple things is what got to me

------
yosoyubik
There seems to be some controversy over the book that's mentioned in the video
(Engelbart Hypothesis)

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/books-
unauthorized.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/books-
unauthorized.html)

"This book is unauthorized. Douglas Engelbart was not an author on this book.
Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau were the sole authors of this book. Listing
Doug Engelbart as lead author was one of many problems with this book"

------
DonHopkins
Douglas C. Engelbart: A Profile of His Work and Vision: Past, Present and
Future.

Prepared by Logitech, October 2005.

[https://www.logitech.com/lang/pdf/Engelbart_Backgrounder.pdf](https://www.logitech.com/lang/pdf/Engelbart_Backgrounder.pdf)

------
s16h
I've put a bunch of the videos mentioned here into a Highlight list:
[https://highlight.app/stajbakhsh/doug-
engelbart](https://highlight.app/stajbakhsh/doug-engelbart)

Feel free to add more to it.

------
DonHopkins
Augmenting Human Intellect. A Conceptual Framework by Doug Engelbart.

[http://www.1962paper.org/](http://www.1962paper.org/)

In 1962 Doug Engelbart published what may be the most important paper in
computer history and in human augmentation.

This is where he laid out his concept of interactive computing and which would
lead to him and his team to invent the mouse, word processing, email, and most
of what we today consider personal computing. We still have far to go to live
up to the dreams and ideas presented here:

Read Augmenting Human Intellect

[http://www.1962paper.org/web.html](http://www.1962paper.org/web.html)

This presentation of the paper hosted and presented by The Liquid Information
Company, makers of richly interactive text, inspired by and in dialog with
Doug Engelbart whom we were honoured to make a webomentary on as well:
Invisible Revolution, The Doug Engelbart Documentary.

You should also see the 1968 Demo this paper resulted in:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

------
EdiX
It's a shame that the Computer History Museum never finished its NLS
restoration project [1] just because the copyright holder could not be nailed
down.

[1]
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/nlsproject](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/nlsproject)

------
DonHopkins
The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

The Mother of All Demos

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark
computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery /
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer
Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented
by Douglas Engelbart on 9 December, 1968.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer
hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS.
The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental
elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient
navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word
processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-
time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to
publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The
demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox
PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple
Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in
the 1980s and 1990s.

