Jan 30, 1925 — Douglas Engelbart Was Born
January 30, 1925
If you think Steve Jobs or Bill Gates invented the modern computer, you’re mistaken. They packaged and sold ideas that Douglas Engelbart had already shown to the world back in the 1960s and 70s.
Today, Engelbart would have turned 101. A perfect reason to remember why, without him, we might still be talking to machines through punch cards or command lines.
“The Mother of All Demos”
In 1968, Engelbart delivered a 90-minute presentation that went down in history as The Mother of All Demos. Picture the era of massive mainframes, and there he is on stage demonstrating:
A computer mouse (at the time, a wooden block with two wheels)
Hypertext (clickable links)
A multi-window interface
Real-time video conferencing
Collaborative document editing
A chorded keyboard (a five-key device designed to launch commands through key combinations)
For the audience, it looked like magic. Engelbart wasn’t just building hardware; he was shaping a concept called NLS (oN-Line System) — a system meant to augment human intellect. By the way, this is one of the earliest uses of the word “online.”
Engelbart believed that humanity’s problems were becoming too complex, and that we needed tools to think faster and more effectively together. He didn’t want to make computers “easier for housewives”; he wanted to make them more powerful for creators.
Later, his ideas made their way into Xerox PARC, and from there into the Apple Macintosh and Windows. But Engelbart himself often remained in the shadow of his own inventions. He never became a billionaire. His mouse patent expired before the device became mainstream. Yet he gained something greater — the status of a prophet of the digital age.
Be sure to watch The Mother of All Demos. You’ll be amazed to see how many of today’s everyday technologies were already working almost 60 years ago.
The Mother of All Demos
https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY?si=4L8_iIHYPilhfESW
Computer mouse patent
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3541541A/en