It’s hard to imagine how we’d interact with computers today without the work of engineer and inventor Douglas Engelbart, who pioneered many aspects of computer science and also invented the computer mouse. The breadth and depth of his work led him to believe that humanity’s digital era could be the most significant in its history.
The digital revolution
Engelbart, then a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute where he led the development of interactive computing, was delivering a demonstration now considered by many as legendary.
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This spoken presentation, known as ‘The Mother of All Demos‘, involved a 90-minute showcase in which his team described their progress to a captivated audience.
Engelbart wasn’t standing at a podium, but at a computer that was based 30 miles away in his research lab. The event cycled between spoken passages, live demos, and different members of the team using teleconferencing to speak about different technologies.
A new era
During this talk, he delivered his opinion that their work, which would lay the foundation for advancements in the years to come, was a more important contribution than both writing – and even printing.
This was an incredibly bold prediction, because he was comparing the digital revolution to core aspects of the human condition. Writing and printing fundamentally opened pathways for sustainable knowledge transfer, allowing humanity to pass on and build on progress over the course of millennia.
If anybody was poised to know the significance of the computing era, it was Eglebart. His work was at the heart of many of the technologies that we take for granted today, including the humble computer mouse. In 1964, he built a small, carved wooden block featuring a single button on top and two metal wheels beneath to track movement. He went on to demonstrate this for the first time at his 1968 demo.
