The Mother of All Demos
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The Mother of All Demos is the name often given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9 1968 demonstration at the Convention Center in San Francisco. At the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart demonstrated the workings of the NLS (which stood for oNLine System) to the 1,000 computer professionals in attendance. The project was the result of work done at Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing the paper paradigm, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext.
The first known usage of the phrase was in journalist Steven Levy's book, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. It may have been inspired by the "mother of all..." formulation that was in vogue at the time as a result of Saddam Hussein's famous reference in 1991 to the upcoming Persian Gulf War as the "mother of all battles".
External links
- [Google streaming video of 1968 Demo]
- [RealPlayer streaming video format]
- [The entire demo in one QuickTime file]
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