1968 “Mother of All Demos” by SRI’s Doug Engelbart and Team
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as the go-to reference for how many modern computing ideas, collaboration included, were demonstrated in 1968.
What it is
Highlights from Doug Engelbart's December 1968 demonstration at SRI, the first public showing of the mouse, hypertext, windows, real-time collaborative editing and shared-screen teleconferencing. This is a roughly six-minute condensed version of the full demo.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites DonHopkins · 2020-01 · on “Google Sheets was down”
52 years ago, people could edit content simultaneously, actually. 1968 “Mother of All Demos” by SRI’s Doug Engelbart and Team [this video] [LINK] The failure to inherently support multiple cursors by default was one of Doug Engelbart's major disappointments about mainstream non-collaborative user interfaces, because collaboration was the whole point of NLS/Augment, so multiple cursors weren't a feature so much as a symptom. Bret Victor discussed it in a few words on Doug Engelbart that he wrote on the day of his death: [LINK] >Say you bring up his 1968 demo on YouTube and watch a bit. At one point, the face of a remote collaborator, Bill Paxton, appears on screen, and Engelbart and Paxton have a
Cites twobitshifter · 2021-08 · on “GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces”
See Englebart’s mother of all demos. I think he had everything in your first couple paragraphs working in 1968! [this video]
Cites GeekyBear · 2023-01 · on “The Xerox Thieves: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates [video]”
People always seem to forget that Xerox borrowed a lot of ideas themselves. Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute gets credit for many innovations, including the mouse. The infamous "mother of all demos" can be seen here: [this video] Going back to the early 60's, there was an equally famous GUI demonstration at MIT, using a light pen instead of a mouse as a user input device for rudimentary CAD. [LINK] Finally, anybody who claims that the Mac or Windows was nothing but a copy of the Alto has never seen an Alto in action. [LINK]
Cites skibz · 2024-11 · on “Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?”
I don't think I have the skill to learn a stenographer's keyboard, but I would love to have a small chorded keyboard just for macros. I always liked the look of Doug Engelbart's one in the Mother of All Demos. It's very basic, but I'd be quite satisfied with something like that today. He demonstrates it at about 1:40: [this video]