MarcelVEVO - 2012-07-09
"The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor."
I don't understand - this should be celebrated as one of those moments in history when someone steps out of relative obscurity and changes EVERYTHING. Imagine Edison coming out of nowehere and not just presenting the light bulb, but a city block fully lit with street lamposts, and fully lit apartment building with individual units all set up with light switches, ceiling lamps, desk lamps etc etc. This is like Einstein's Miracle year, or the publication of The Origin of Species. This is absolutely monumental. Epochal.
How could they have put together all that technology, HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE in one working system? The vision it must have took to assemble all the disparate technologies into this is beyond comprehension.
lolololol well played.
@SMGJohn The masses are asses.
https://youtu.be/sen8Tn8CBA4
At least it makes it easier to succeed, when everybody else isn't all that bright.
Too sad you can't internalize the thought of 'Be nice to others'
@College Ke Baad I'm very nice, but also realistic. Some people want somebody else to solve their problems, because they are too uninterested to make an effort, that would only benefit themselves.
It's so frustrating, to the point where sometimes it's best to mind one's own business.
"Don't Try To Teach Pigs To Fly"
https://play.acast.com/s/thetailopezshowgrandtheoryofeverything/dont-try-to-teach-pigs-to-fly-how-to-not-waste-time-on-the-wrong-people-or-activities
The time between the invention of a fundamentally new technology (in terms of substrate, not form) and the implementation thereof is essential in understanding why certain things are remembered and others are reduced in importance in cultural memory. Personality or persona can play a huge role, see the Catholic Church vs the printing press (Luther-Gutenberg) or Einstein-Bohr.
The powers that were/are in the control of information "chose" to claim certain innovations and discard their innovators. Generational wealth transfer to the "tribal" in-group is the unconscious/deliberate motive.
Why is his 45 year old pre-web-cam stream clearer than my 2013 Skype?
Lookup 4K Film Scans of Classic Movies. Electronic Sensor was vastly inferior to big stock fill for a long time until recently.
Webcams today are today more advanced than camera gear in 1968, when this was presented.
Encryption and compression doing its part, I guess
Because you people buy pointless cheap chinese tat made by the lowest bidder for cameras, no amount of video processing algorithms can magically create information that ins't there, i.e. unless you have functional optics in your webcam it'll look like shit no matter what you do. And the optics package on the camera these guys are using is worth more than your house in todays prices.
@Meton12765 Who is you people?
A 16mm film of this demo was sent to the UK. At the time I was a lowly AV Technician at University College London. I ran the film in the New Chemistry Theatre for all the staff of the University of London Computer Centre and other interested parties. I watched fascinated. However, after 90 minutes, when it ended and the audience of senior London computing academics filed out, I heard several make comments such as "Interesting, but it will never catch on" and "What a waste of time." They had just seen the first ever Mouse, Hypertext, WP, video conferencing, and the Internet (Arpanet). I BELIEVED Doug Engelbart - they didn't! Here we are. years later, after the Xerox Star, Apple's Lisa and Mac and finally Windows. Amazing. As another commenter says, Doug should be as well known as Einstein - and FAR better than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates!
When the telephone came along, people said "What's the point? It will put delivery boys out of work."
Similar sentiment, different century. It's a sad thing.
Ahah, love this comment, thanks for sharing!
@RICH DISCOVERIES people then had no context, I think they probably thought very differently. Computers were, for the most part, strictly business machines back then (and very large). Due to those constraints, people would have trouble grasping its usefulness.
thats what I say about Ellon musk, transgenders, virtual reality, global income, world one order, etc etc, and everyone looks at me like im stupid
So your story is basically. "I was really clever and everyone else was stupid." cool story bro!
This is what genius is. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." -Arthur Schopenhauer
So it's 1968 and computers are literally huge mainframes that just do math. Suddenly this guy pops up outta nowhere and introduces collaborative word processing in Google docs with his homeboy Bill English via live teleconferencing feed while dragging a cursor around on his screen with a mouse.
Some highlights:
5:00 - input: keyboard, mouse, extra-keyboard
31:30 - mouse
15:45 - todo list associated with a map
1:16:57 - hangouts + collaboratively editing of docs
Hollywood still thinks computers beep and boop like this
And I think the only reason they beeped and booped was because of how precious screen space was (and because everything was basically text-mode) so it represented a fairly simple but effective way to get your attention or to alert you of things.
@Nathaniel Lewis I think it did not actually make those noises at all, I guess we are hearing radio frequencies sent out by the computer and picked up by the TV equipment used to record the demo.
They still do here.
@Nathaniel Lewis You could input and show graphics in this system faster than you can today with Word and excel. It's not only text-mode.
Amazing!! One of the founders!! Not a Greek god, but a Geek god! He died less than 2 years ago, and wasn't even a blip on the radar, to the mainstream media. Depressing!
Exclamation point!
You sound like trump. XD
@Alex Nuzum Yeah, ok.
@Alex Nuzum Huuuge!
All this, and yet Douglas Engelbart's place in history will be very unknown compared to
Steve Jobs, who never invented anything. Jobs was a great marketer and had the vision to hire a great design team. To me, that's not historical.
+Melomaneist what paradigm did he shift? I know what he SHIT tough.
I'm nowhere near a fan of Jobs but I find the the hate he generates as disproportionnated as the cult he has.
He made a decisive link between the engineer and the layman, a thing that a lot of big companies with the brightest people in the field still manage to fail regularly today despite almost illimited ressources.
He maybe never invented anything but he repeatedly articulated technologies with most of the time far more success than his concurrents.
When people say "Steve Jobs, the man who saw the future", we now know they mean he saw a video of this demo.
Steve Jobs did DICK. He stood on the shoulders of those FAR better than him and sold their ideas. He never invented anything. He never innovated. All Apple products existed in part from other companies.
Except in personal computers, where his company has 4% share.
This is true innovation and a huge step forward.
Nowadays companies present "innovation" and sometimes it's just mostly cosmetic changes. :-/
It's corporate greed. They make changes which are not necessarily better, but make the product look different so the consumers will buy new versions.
yes
@Cameron Hall
It never crosses you bitter commie-boy's minds that consumers ENJOY the "cosmetic changes," which is why they buy them in the first place.
@A. E. Well, people prefer different things in a product. I prefer function over form, so I don't buy a new version of MS Word, simply because it can do the same thing as the last version, except it looks different and runs slower.
this guy is using a mouse, webcams, and Skype like video calling over a network connection (internet like) in the 1960's demonstrating relational database theories still being worked on today...
+Negasuki Yes and where did they get those headsets with little mics that look cooler even than the ones available today?
Well they had enough money for all the coolest parts. Bob Taylor who ordered Doug to give the demo told the story that (sorry can't remember where) the 1968 demo alone cost about 10Milj. in todays money.
@bobinorlando Plantronics headset ( the same brand was used on the moon by Apollo 11 astronauts)
The awesome thing is he is using them in a system that displays it's code in the same way it displays the content, and you can change that code on the fly. It's self-programmable and that is awesome!
"We call it a mouse. I don't know why we called it a mouse, sometimes I apologize to people for that. It just started and we never did change it." 31:30
Well, you're going to be apologizing for a long time then!
a mouse: for it has a tail ( to tell )
I like how they call the mouse pointer a "bug". lol I love it.
So True
They invented meta-tags as well. Amazing they were able to do all of this in the 1960s.
A shame the technology took almost 2 decades to be cheap enough to do this for the mass market, and longer still to become mainstream, but this pioneering work should be acknowledged more often.
Just so people get the sense of how monumental that moment was... people were still using punch cards at that time when it came to computing...
this guy is a freaking miracle worker, its amazing he is so unknown to so many people, people should know his name just as much as they know Einstein's
Yeah, him and Ivan Sutherland. They came from another dimension.
This is incredible. Think about it: This is a demo of technology that would take 15 YEARS before consumer applications caught up....and we're still using this technology today. Engelbart was so very ahead of his time, in so many ways. It amuses me to realize, as I'm watching this....I'm typing words into this text box and using my mouse(a word Engelbart coined) to move around. Engelbart must have felt so vindicated as he got older. Though, it's sad he was never fully recognized for what he's given us. He was a true shaman of technology...especially when it comes to his philosophy & ethos of the full potential of technology to make the world a better place. Much respect....
The whole video gives me goosebumps. He was showing technology from 24 years in the future.
Showing the screen as a transparent overlay on top of the presenter is a neat way of doing a presentation.
Never seen it done in modern presentations though. We should start using that concept more.
You just watched a production piece and it required resources.
But the resources now are built into FaceTime...
And now you can watch this presentation on your telephone.
Well it’s important to note that your telephone is not an analog wire connected to the wall, but a self-contained has held computer with near infinite storage and utterly impossible screen resolution and processing power by early 2000’s standards
@Dan Reynolds you clearly know nothing about computers lol.
@Random Autonomous Drone Pilot i'm a software engineer with 35 years of experience in the industry, dipshit.
In December 1968, the 21st Century dropped in for a four-week stay. Not only this incredible demonstration of what is essentially 21st century computer technology, but also the Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission only 12-days later. After all the killings, political assassinations, riots and invasions in 1968, it's like the future descended on the final month of a bleak year to give it hope.
This is amazing. It's like witnessing the birth of the tech talk. Hell, I guess it is that.
In 1968 this would probably seem like magic to me.
+gunflame It does to me. Even in 2016
It did to Jobs and Gates who got rich and credit off these ideas.
scientific magic my friend
@journeyquest1 That's kind of like saying that the inventor of the TV was just riding the coattails of the inventor of the light bulb.
It would have seemed sophisticated to me at the time, but I would have failed to grasp it's full possibilities.
Douglas Engelbart == John Titor?
This is incredible....simply incredible
Mikael Murstam delicious simply delicious
This is genius beyond comprehension.
Anyone who makes a living programming knows how to recognise genius like this.
This should be sent to space - it already fells like some ancient genius remain from a civilization.
Thank you, Doug. Planet was better with you.
Known for
Computer mouse
Hypertext
Groupware
Interactive computing
Their is something extremely musical and pretty about the noises it makes.
Is the computer actually making those noises, or is the Primitive webcam he's using picking up electrical frequency interference being admitted by the computer as it is computing? That's what I'm trying to figure out
@RICH DISCOVERIES I know my reply is late but when I had a low quality integrated soundcard I could hear every interference my motherboard created, even mouse movement since that also generated data. So by that theory we should be able to hear the noise every time he moves the mouse. Of course I can be very well wrong but it seems like the sounds were intentional.
@nope lol no worries, thank you for the reply. I just found this entire scenario to be very interesting
Amazing this ran on an old mainfraime with a simple 24-bit CPU and presumably ~192K of magnetic core RAM. The CRT looks like a vector display from the almost handwritten quality to the text due to the yoke not being able to deflect the electron beam accurately (tech limitations).
I think this guy was born in 21st Century and time travelled back...
cjwfly1988 who invented the mouse from his universe?
Some guy in 2007....
Not my proudest fap, but hey, you have to admit, this is a very exciting moment in Computing History!
I'm really impressed they made graphical output on the screen. I thought these were only capable of text.
So in 55 years humanity has degenerated from this to UNIX, DOS, WordPerfect, Windows, Macintoshes, Linux, facebook, twitter, World Wide Web, NSA snooping and Ed Snowdens.....amazing!
All I want to know is, how in the world did we go from this to DOS. 1968. Absolutely amazing!
MS-DOS was bought by Bill Gates as 86-DOS, the commercial name for QDOS - Quick & Dirty Operating System - because time to market was more important than quality. And as noted above, hardware to support this demo was also way too expensive for the target market back then.
This! So much this! It's as if we went backwards.
Corporations saw what university's where doing then tried to patent the technologies so they could have a monopoly. That is why innovation slowed down and systems became incompatible with each other. Then international standards had to be agreed on because the technology was becoming too complex and complicated. If all patents and copyrights where published on line innovation would be huge because people could she which patents where no longer valid and current patents could be reverse engineered and made open source.
@Cees Timmerman Garry kildall was the person who invented the operating system that became Windows. His story is on YouTube.
Because this was a monolithic system. Operating systems that acted as a host to programs was not invented yet. MSDOS didn't need most of these features, because applications supported many of these functions (MSDOS had mouse support, of course).
I remember Englebart's and many other people's contributions to the early time-sharing work, and installed one of the nodes of the early ARPAnet in 1972. We had an SDS 940 in 1969, I think and evolved it to be part of an internal multi-computer network with a common commuications system in 1977 call COED (see Wikipedia). Many people at SRI also deserve credit for innovations in software, hardware and user interfaces. What a great demo for it's time!
No Apple, no Xerox...1968 epic, excellent...
I am totally amazed at how modern the presentation itself is set up. This is what the audience saw on a giant screen. Ted avant le mot.
Too many mind blowing things in here; I started making a list but gave up. Why do we not have all this now, 50 years later? Something akin to the sacking of the Alexandrian library must have happened.
Just when I thought I had suffered most of the mind-blowing, they turn on the video conferencing. I will never recover from this; I'm scarred for life now.
People, I don't care how advanced you think we are; we are living in the computing middle ages. It's high time to seek enlightenment from the founders.
@Wim Rijnders In December 1968, the 21st Century dropped in for a four-week stay. Not only this incredible demonstration of what is essentially 21st century computer technology, but also the Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission only 12-days later. After all the killings, political assassinations, riots and invasions in 1968, it's like the future descended on the final month of a bleak year to give it hope.
@Wim Rijnders Well said my friend. This is incredible. Think about it: This is a demo of technology that would take 15 YEARS before consumer applications caught up....and we're still using this technology today. Engelbart was so very ahead of his time, in so many ways. It amuses me to realize, as I'm watching this....I'm typing words into this text box and using my mouse(a word Engelbart coined) to move around. Engelbart must have felt so vindicated as he got older. Though, it's sad he was never fully recognized for what he's given us. He was a true shaman of technology...especially when it comes to his philosophy & ethos of the full potential of technology to make the world a better place. Much respect....
Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to see the root cause of what hampers technological innovation.
Damn. Dude must've had a time machine out back.
Keep in mind, this computer filled entire rooms! We are just looking at a dumb terminal.
Amazing........no popups!
I can't stop laughing at, "I don't know why we called it that. It started that way and we never changed it" That is SOOOO common.
The Engelbart had landed.
They were kind of naive back then, "augmenting the human intellect", sure, but we mostly augmented our laziness and entertainment.
Seven months later we landed on the moon. What an exciting time.
It was a time for dreaming big, but we;re bringing it back...errr with walls and coal and what not.
color TVs came too
Crazy to think this was less than 25 years after World War II.
This presentation should be shown in schools! Agree with many viewers, Engelbart should be a household name, like Edison or Pasteur...
50 years later and Google Maps still can't even do this: @15:51
Yes it can. Routes is an option. Just click on multiple stops
Just to realize how revolutionary this is, just see what every other computer in 1968 looked like... basically the equivalent of being around the first Wright Brothers flight with an F-22 Raptor.
And i grew up being told Xerox were the first..
I would assume this was done with a mainframe, as I don't believe client/server nor personal computing had been invented yet. So, that had to get created first before we could see the major advances we have today. Hence, 15 years before we see this being used in a big way.
Me if I saw this in '68: "OH GOD. WHAT IS THIS?! AM A DEAD?!"
charvelgtrs - 2019-07-08
This guy was literally 30+ yrs ahead of his time. He's even got a gamer headset on lol.
Julian Diehl - 2020-02-17
And the first Roccat Sova.