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Mother of all demos
December 10, 2024"It would be wonderful if I can inspire others, who are struggling to realize their dreams, to say: If this country kid could do it, let me keep slogging away." — Douglas Englebart ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Hey look, a chance to support the newsletter!
Please let me know here if you can't see the ads. Thanks! ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ Keep slogging away ...It's the 1930s, and a boy named Douglas is growing up on a small farm in Oregon. He spends his childhood surrounded by fields and forests. Life is quiet, simple. But inside his mind? There’s nothing quiet about it. He asks big questions, and most of the adults around him can't answer them. It's the 1940s. The world changes as Douglas reaches his teenage years. The Great Depression gives way to war, and Douglas finds himself swept up. He graduates from high school and goes directly into the U.S. Navy, becoming a radar technician. He spends countless hours with the cutting-edge machinery of the time. The work is tedious, but he's enthralled. He's not just punching buttons. He’s thinking. Machines, he realizes, aren’t just tools. They can amplify human capabilities. They can extend what’s possible. It's the 1950s. Douglas, now a veteran, returns to civilian life. He goes to college, gets his degree in electrical engineering, gets married, and starts a family. He’s got a steady job at a government research lab. On paper, everything looks good. Stable. Comfortable. But he's restless. Sitting in a library one day, he has a realization that changes his life. He imagines a world in which humanity can tackle its biggest challenges collectively. What if machines could help people think better, communicate better, work better together? And what if sharing information on screens, like the radar he used in the war, were among the keys? What if, instead of just processing numbers, computers could augment human intelligence? It's the 1960s. Douglas's vision consumes him. He leaves his steady job and begins the uphill battle to make his dream a reality. He joins the Stanford Research Institute, where he assembles a team of brilliant, unconventional thinkers. They call themselves the Augmentation Research Center, or ARC, and together they work on something truly radical: a system they call the oN-Line System, or NLS. It’s not just software. It’s a philosophy, a way of thinking about technology as an amplifier for human potential. It's the cup of the 1970s. After years of work, Douglas and his team have created tools nobody has seen before and few have imagined. Finally, on December 9, 1968 -- so, 56 years ago yesterday -- Douglas has the opportunity to debut some of the technology he and his team have developed — things like:
The cord reminded Douglas of a tail, so he called the device a "mouse." It's now the 2020s, of course and our main character today was in fact named Douglas -- Douglas Engelbart, who gave a 90-minute demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco all those years ago, that people now call "the Mother of All Demos." Even the way he shared is demo was groundbreaking -- a custom-built computer terminal, connected via a network to his team back at their lab, with a massive screen projecting every move he makes so that the audience can see it all in real time. The entire demonstration is preserved online, and it's intriguing to see a group of enthralled people from the past getting their first all-in-one glimpse the future. The contributions of Douglas Englebart were overshadowed later by more entreprenurial names and simpler visions of personal computing. But his dream was always bigger than just making machines more useful. He wanted to make people more capable. We need a quote of the day. Douglas had a lot of good ones, but I like this quote for what it says not just about the time when he unveiled his works, but the earlier decision he made to to pursue it. "It would be wonderful if I can inspire others, who are struggling to realize their dreams, to say: If this country kid could do it, let me keep slogging away." Slog away, my friends.
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Bill Murphy Jr.
Hi. I write the Understandably daily newsletter—no algorithms, no outrage, just an essential daily newsletter trusted by 175,000+ smart people who want to understand the world, one day at a time. Plus bonus ebooks (aka 'Ubooks').
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