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The mother of all demos

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:40 pm
by Doug Coulter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY


You might want to watch this when you have some spare time. In this one, Douglas Englebart, in 1968, demos a number of computer firsts to a stunned audience to whom this might as well be sci-fi or magic.
First mouse. First GUI. First word processing. First chording keyboard (drat, didn't catch on). And so on. No one knew, or could guess what all this would become by now, all these years later, so it's kind of fun to look at this, primitive as it is (yet in some ways, more advanced than most things till quite recently) - and see if you could have figured out where it would go from there.

Remember, before this, the more advanced guys had KSR-33 110 baud teletypes on a timeshare mainframe, but those were the advanced guys. The rest of us used decks of cards, with instructions on which deck to run after mounting which tapes and so on, and where to stack any printout - we'd get our jobs run sometime within the week. To say the least, that made debugging a lot more interesting than today's fast edit/compile/test loop (or in my case, just edit/test since I'm doing scripting most of the time these days outside of arduino stuff).

Just a good little bit of history. Hard to tell where you are if you don't have a clue where you came from.