The Mother of all Technology Demonstrations

I think today's article is a great way to close out a year -- by looking back at a fundamental piece of our technological past.

Last week I ran an article highlighting another blogger's 'history of the internet'. A comment inquired why she had not included any mention of what has been called the 'mother of all demos'.

This refers to a public demonstration made in 1968 by a group of technologists at Stanford Research Institute in California. In their 90-minute demonstration the world got their first view of the (computer) mouse, hypertext (which was the impetus for the way your internet browser sees other computers' pages), and more. 

It is very dated but it is an amazing piece of technology history and it is captured on film and is online for us all to view.  If you ponder that this was a little more than 30 years ago it is pretty amazing the advances we have made (and the genius behind these technologies).

From the host website:  The original 100-minute video of this event is part of the Engelbart Collection in Special Collections of Stanford University. This original video has been edited into 35 segments and reformatted as Flash streaming video clips. There is a brief abstract of the subject matter treated in each segment.

You can check out this bit of history here: Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo