SDS 940 · Menlo Park · 192 kilobytes
The Mother of All Demos — 04 / 07
The Machine
Everything on the screen that afternoon ran on less memory than a modern web page's fonts.
01
192 kilobytes, shared by everyone
NLS ran on a Scientific Data Systems 940 at Menlo Park, with 192 kilobytes of core memory shared across every user at once. Plug-in circuit cards on one side of the cabinet, core memory on the other — every bit of it a hand-threaded ferrite ring.
A machine of this class cost, in 1968 dollars, more than a house.
02
Thirty miles of link
The picture travelled by two microwave links down the peninsula and back. The keystrokes travelled by leased line. None of it was productised; all of it worked, for ninety minutes, in front of a thousand people.
Constraint was not the obstacle
The ideas were never waiting on hardware. They were waiting on someone to take the screen seriously.