(2018-12-09) How Doug Engelbart Pulled Off The Mother Of All Demos

How Douglas Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos. Don Andrews: (another colleague at the Augmentation Research Center) We knew from the onset, based on Doug’s vision, what we were trying to do. We were looking for ways of rapidly prototyping new user interfaces, and so building a framework, an infrastructure, that we could go into and build something on top of, over and over, very quickly. We knew that things were going to change very quickly, and essentially we were bootstrapping ourselves.

Bill Paxton: Being immersed in the group where everybody was using the same tools and using them on a day-to-day basis, and where the people who were developing the tools were sitting next to the people who were using the tools—that was a really tight loop that led to very rapid progress.

Bob Taylor: In those days there were always, at these computer conferences, panel discussions attacking the idea of interactive computing. The reasons were multitudinous

Taylor: Even within that community of people who were doing work on interactive computing, there was probably a pecking order of some sort. There always is. Doug’s group, at that time, before this demo, was probably at the bottom of that pecking order.

Taylor: Doug and I talked about doing this demo in early ’68, and I was strongly encouraging Doug to do it. He said, “It’s going to cost a fortune

Alan Kay: And basically, when they approached Taylor about doing this, Taylor said, “Look, spend what you need, but don’t do it small—and be redundant enough so the thing really works.”

Kay: I believe ARPA spent $175,000 of 1968 money for that one demo. That’s probably like a million bucks today.

Bill English: It was a challenge to get everything from SRI to the Civic Center. I mean that was 30 miles away! What we did was lease two video circuits from the phone company. They set up a microwave link: two transmitters on the top of the building at SRI, receiver/transmitters up on Skyline Boulevard on a truck, and two receivers at the Civic Center. Cables of course going down into the room at both ends. That was our video link. Going back we had two dedicated 1,200-baud lines: high-speed lines at the time. Homemade modems.

Kay: In those days the Whole Earth Catalog, which was actually a store as well, was located right across the street from SRI.

Kay: Stewart Brand was just involved. I met him through Bill English, at a party. A lot of the Whole Earth people were there.

We never did a full rehearsal of the event; there were partial rehearsals, but that was a real-time improvisation that people saw

Andy van Dam: At the time, I had been working with Ted Nelson on our first hypertext system with a team of three part-time undergraduates. We were working in the hammer-and-chisel phase of this industrial revolution, coding in assembly language, and we were pretty good at it. But, here these guys had invented machine tools.