1973 · 1984 · 1991 · now
The Mother of All Demos — 06 / 07
Afterwards
The audience stood. Within a decade much of the room had moved to Xerox PARC and built the machine that carried these ideas everywhere.
01
The line
The Alto arrived at PARC in 1973 with a display, a mouse and a chorded keyset, built largely by people from that room. In 1984 the graphical personal computer reached the public; the mouse came with it and the keyset did not. In 1991 the web gave linking a global address, twenty-three years after San Francisco.
Engelbart's own lab lost its funding. He spent his career arguing that the industry took the easy half and left the rest — the training, the chords, the collective work — behind.
02
What is still open
Shared documents, live cursors and video in the corner of the same window have been rebuilt so many times they are invisible. The other half — deliberately raising what a trained group can think about together — is still open work.
Start with the film
Ninety minutes, 1968, and still the best place to begin.