march 2009 | vol. 52 | no. 3 | communications of the acm 21
news
silos—application programs that mir-
ror the development organizations that
produced them” and whose “common
denominator is importing and export-
ing bitmaps,” he said. Computing, van
Dam suggested, should “go back to the
future.”
Alan Kay, president of Viewpoints
Research Institute, said what most at-
tracted him to Engelbart’s goal was to
use computers to improve the world.
However, people disagreed about
what it means to augment intellect.
Furthermore, he said, the biggest
unsolved problem is how to capture
group wisdom and the difficulty of
summarizing it.
Kay and van Dam both lamented
today’s practitioners’ lack of curiosity
and historical context. “We’re incredi-
bly wedged… conceptually, technically,
emotionally, and psychologically into a
tiny and boring form of computing that
is not even utilitarian,” said Kay. “I’d be
O
n D e Ce M BeR 9, 1968, Doug-
las C. Engelbart and his
Stanford Research Institute
(SRI) team demonstrated
their latest inventions at
the Fall Joint Computer Conference
in San Francisco in an event popularly
known as “The Mother of All Demos.”
Engelbart’s demonstration includ-
ed the world debut of the computer
mouse, plus the introduction of inter-
active text, email, teleconferencing and
videoconferencing, and hypertext.
But Engelbart, director of SRI’s Aug-
mentation Research Center, had lofty
aspirations for the system, called NLS
(for oNLine System). His goal was to
create an integrated system that would
“augment human intellect” by facili-
tating collaboration and bootstrap-
ping—continually improving the im-
provement process—and thereby help
people better the world. NLS, he hoped,
would enable a new way of thinking
about how humans work, learn, and
live together.
Last December two celebrations—
one at the Tech Museum of Innova-
tion in San Jose, and another at Stan-
ford University—commemorated the
demonstration’s 40th anniversary,
and industry luminaries honored En-
gelbart and his team’s achievements,
discussed how the event changed their
thinking, and examined its impact on
computing.
Andries van Dam, a professor of
computer science at Brown University,
extolled what he had felt back then was
so “mind-blowing” about the demo—
that it reflected a broad, new way of
thinking about design. “It was a huge
beautiful suite of tools that allowed a
recursive, self-improvement process—
very fast progressive refinement cycles
that really raised the collective IQ of the
group and made the tools more power-
ful,” he said.
However, van Dam was disappoint-
ed that the idealism of an integrated
system has been lost. “Today we have
happy to burn the whole thing down
and start over again.”
Kay said few people objected when
browsers were no longer WYSIWYG-
capable “because [people] were not
sophisticated enough to have the per-
spective to complain.” And van Dam
objected to “dumbed-down” links. In
the past, “we had fine-grained, bidi-
rectional, tagged links useful for infor-
mation retrieval and viewing specifica-
tions for links and their destinations,”
he said. “We need to get them back and
not just be stuck with URLs.”
Kay warned that suboptimal tools
can reshape us, and called on attend-
ees to spread Engelbart’s vision. “Per-
haps the real significance of NLS,”
he said, “is that it put an idea into the
world that is a difficult one, but… it’s
an idea none of us can forget.”
Based in manhattan, Karen A. Frenkel is a freelance
writer and editor specializing in science and technology.
a Difficult, unforgettable idea
On the 40th anniversary of Douglas C. Engelbart’s “The Mother of All Demos,”
computer scientists discuss the event’s influence—and imagine what could have been.
News | DOI:10.1145/1467247.1467255 Karen A. Frenkel
clockwise from top left: a video still of Douglas c. engelbart during “the mother of all
Demos” in 1968; engelbart conducting a workshop circa 1967; and a closeup view of the
ergonomic keyboard and mouse setup used in the 1968 demonstration.
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