The Mother of All Demos
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The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968 demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) at the Convention Center in San Francisco, in which a number of experimental technologies that have since become commonplace were presented. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext.
Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team, demonstrated the workings of the NLS (which stood for oNLine System) to the 1,000 computer professionals in attendance. The project was the result of work done at SRI International's Augmentation Research Center.
The session was actually presented under the title A research center for augmenting human intellect. Bill English is listed as the co-author of the FJCC conference paper of the same name, and acknowledged as one of the principal engineers responsible for NLS and the demo.
The term "Mother of All Demos" referenced "The Mother of All Battles," a name used by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to describe the 1991 Gulf War; the term "the mother of all" subsequently became a widely used stock phrase or snowclone. The first known usage of the phrase was in journalist Steven Levy's 1994 book, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything ISBN 978-0140291773:
"... a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos. Engelbart's support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert. ..." - Insanely Great, page 42
Subsequently, Andries van Dam repeated the phrase in a speech at the 1998 Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution Conference (opening of Session 3), and the phrase was also cited in John Markoff's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer ISBN 978-0670033829.
[edit] External links
- Google streaming video of 1968 demo
- Copy of presentation flyer
- "The Demo", a website with video archives of the event
- Engelbart's 1968 demo a brief review of What the Dormouse Said followed by an authorized excerpt focused on the Demo.
- Published citations for Engelbart, D. & English, W. (1968). A research center for augmenting human intellect. AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference. p. 295-410
- The programming languages behind "the mother of all demos"
- A copy of the original 1968 Engelbart 1968 FJCC session flyer
- The Invisible Revolution is a documentary about Doug Engelbart.
