On 9 December 1968, in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart gave a 90-minute live demonstration that has become known as "The Mother of All Demos". In one sitting he showed a room of engineers ideas that would take the rest of the industry decades to catch up with.
Why it mattered
In that single demo, Engelbart and his team presented the computer mouse, on-screen windows, hypertext links, real-time collaborative editing, and even video conferencing — a working glimpse of how people would use computers for the next half-century.
At the time, computers were batch machines you fed punched cards; the idea that a computer could be an interactive tool to augment human thinking was radical. Engelbart's vision directly inspired the researchers at Xerox PARC, whose work in turn shaped the Apple Macintosh and every graphical interface since. It is one of the clearest examples in the field of a demonstration arriving a generation ahead of the technology needed to make it ordinary.