Take Some Time Today To Watch Doug Engelbart's Demo
from the you'll-be-glad-you-did dept
I have a presentation that I've done many times now for various corporate execs (usually from Europe) trying to understand just what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley. It's a fun presentation, and always creates quite a discussion. It goes into a lot of different topic areas, but my favorite part is, right in the middle of my "abbreviated history" of Silicon Valley, when I get to show some clips from Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo of what he was working on at SRI. That demo was the first time the world saw an awful lot of things that are common today: from the mouse (and, yes, he talks about naming the mouse), to a graphical user interface, to hyperlinks, among many other things (including a few computer bugs). I just gave the presentation again two weeks ago, and I realized that we were quickly approaching the 40th anniversary of the demo, which took place on December 9th, 1968.The entire presentation is 75 minutes long, but I've embedded it below. I'm sure many of you won't have time to watch all 75 minutes, but it's absolutely worth watching at least part of it (and then you'll want to keep watching):
Filed Under: 40 years, doug engelbart, mice