On December 9, 1968, in a packed auditorium in San Francisco, a quiet engineer named Douglas Engelbart walked onto a stage holding a small wooden box with a wire tail. About a thousand computer scientists watched as he sat down at a strange desk with a screen and pushed the little box across the table. On the giant projection behind him, a small arrow moved across the screen. Doug clicked. Words highlighted. He clicked again. The crowd gasped.
In the next 90 minutes, Doug demonstrated almost everything a modern computer can do. He showed video chat with a colleague 30 miles away. He shared documents across a network. He clicked on links that jumped between files, the very first hyperlinks. He cut and pasted text. He used the wooden box, which he called a "mouse" because the cable looked like a tail, to drag things around on the screen. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Computers in 1968 were room-sized monsters that only spit out paper printouts. Doug's demo was 30 years ahead of its time.
Reporters later called it "The Mother of All Demos." Doug had been working on these ideas at the Stanford Research Institute for years with a small team and almost no money. He never got rich from inventing the mouse - his patent expired before mice became popular - but every time you scroll on a phone, click on a link, or video chat with grandma, you are using ideas Doug Engelbart showed the world on one unbelievable December afternoon.
