Of hoverboards and hypertext

Abstract

In 1968, Doug Englebart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute amazed the world with their oN-Line System (NLS), giving what has since been dubbed the "Mother of all Demos." The NLS system, later renamed Augment, was the first Graphical User Interface, the first Word Processor, the first Wiki, the first Hypertext system, essentially the first of many applications we think of as modern. Much of the progress in software of the last forty-five years can be seen as attempting to realize the vision first articulated by Englebart at the '68 Fall Joint Computer Conference. However, it has only been recently, with the advent of HTML5 and related standards, that the entirety of the NLS/Augment system can be implemented in the browser in a standardized fashion. This article examines what has changed to finally allow the realization of a half-century old vision and investigates why it took so long. We ask: where are we going next? More importantly, where should we be going? © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.