On December 9, 1968, an engineer named Douglas Engelbart sat on a stage in San Francisco and, in 90 minutes, demonstrated the computer mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing, real-time collaborative editing, and windows — decades before any of it existed for real. A room full of people watched the next 50 years happen at once.
It starts with an essay. Vannevar Bush imagines the 'memex,' a desk that links documents by association — the seed of hypertext. A young Navy radar tech named Engelbart reads it in a Red Cross library.
The man with a single obsession: using computers to 'augment human intellect.' Colleagues thought he was a crank. Meet the visionary before his one impossible afternoon.
The full ~90-minute presentation. Watch him wield the first-ever computer mouse and click a hyperlink live — in 1968. Skeptics in the audience gave a standing ovation.
The Doug Engelbart Institute's cleaned-up version. If the full demo is daunting, start here — the picture quality makes the 1968 magic land harder.
The insiders' account of the staggering logistics: a homemade video link, a leased microwave connection to the lab 30 miles away, and a mouse whittled from wood.
The full inventory of what was unveiled in one sitting: the mouse, windows, hypertext, version control, real-time collaborative editing, and video conferencing.
The actual system behind the demo. Its ideas migrated to Xerox PARC, then to Apple and beyond — the invisible ancestor of the machine you're reading this on.