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The Mother of All Demos
Augmentation Research Center · SRI
The Laboratory
It is called Engelbart's demo. It was not Engelbart's work alone.
The Augmentation Research Center, November 1969. Photograph: SRI International, CC BY-SA 3.0.
01
The people
Thirty-odd people
Bill English built the mouse and directed the show from the auditorium. Jeff Rulifson wrote the software. Bill Paxton was the face and the second pointer at the Menlo Park end. Don Andrews, Roger Bates, Bruce Hardy, Dave Casseres, Martin Hardy and a dozen more built, wired, cued and ran it.
The Augmentation Research Center was thirty-odd people who thought a computer's job was to make a group of humans collectively smarter. Everything on this site is a side effect of that idea.
The Augmentation Research Center at work. Photograph: SRI International, public domain.
02
The idea
Where it came from
In 1945 Engelbart read Vannevar Bush's description of the memex — a desk that holds a library and remembers the trails a reader makes through it — in a Red Cross library in the Philippines.
Newly engaged and deciding his career had no goal, he spent months choosing one, and settled on making groups of people collectively better at hard problems. Augmenting Human Intellect set out the framework in 1962: not a faster clerk, but a system of tools, language, method and training.
Engelbart with the prototype, later in life. Photograph: SRI International, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Read the 1962 framework
Augmenting Human Intellect is still the clearest statement of what the demonstration was for.
The future
was shared.