LA Review of Books:

A mild-mannered engineer stands onstage at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. A massive video screen looms behind him, displaying a close-up of his face in the lower right half of the screen, with a close-up of his computer display superimposed over his face to the left. Introducing his team, he sounds a bit nervous, saying, “If every one of us does our job well, it’ll all go very interesting, I think.”

Today, this presentation would be completely unremarkable. But it’s not 2018 — it’s December 9, 1968. The engineer is Douglas C. Engelbart, founder of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, and nobody in his audience — or in the history of the world — has ever seen anything like it before.

I never tire of hearing more stories and details about the “mother of all demos”. Try to imagine what it was like to be in that audience. Wired also has a piece about it called, “How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos” that’s worth the read as well.