R.I.P. Douglas Engelbart

Recently Douglas Engelbart passed away. He is popular for his human-computer interaction research and famous for a demo session which has been named »The Mother of all Demos« on December 9, 1968. In this demo session he introduced the computer mouse, hypermedia (which lead to HTML) and word processing (plus many other techniques). Watch the video above to see the demo.

I love the Dr. Strangelove-ish spirit of it. If you do not want to watch the whole demo, just put on headphones, switch to another task and enjoy Engelbart’s soothing voice.

[Update:] I think this quote endorses the last point I made: »Ken Kesey who, having received a demo of Engelbart’s NLS (the oNLine System) said, awed, “It’s the next thing after acid.”«

Published by Johannes Luderschmidt

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