Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Mother of All Demos (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Almost every single person listening to this podcast right now is doing so on some sort of personal computing device. Many of the things that we consider part of a modern personal computer, Windows, hyperlinks, a mouse, a text editor, were all released upon the world in a single 90-minute demonstration in 1968. The ideas were so advanced, it would take over two decades before most of them found themselves in everyone's home. Learn more about the mother of all demos and the birth of personal computing on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:01:03 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Despite what you might think, the personal computer didn't start with Steve Jobs in Apple or Bill Gates and Microsoft. To be sure, they had an important role to play, but all of the major innovations we associate with personal computer software were actually developed before Apple or Microsoft even existed. In particular, most of these ideas were developed by one man and the researchers in his laboratory, Douglas Engelbart. And if you don't recognize his name, you probably should. Douglas Engelbart grew up on a farm outside of Portland, Oregon during the Great Depression. He enrolled at Oregon State University for electrical engineering, and like almost everyone else in his generation, he joined the military in World War II.

Starting point is 00:01:55 He enlisted in the Navy and became a radar technician. After the war, he returned to college and completed his degree in 1948. He then went to work at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, or NACA. The NACA was the predecessor of NASA. After serving in the war, he wanted to direct his energies towards peaceful purposes, and he saw the potential in the electronic computer. In 1951, there were very few computers in the entire world. Those that did exist were enormous behemoths that took up entire rooms or buildings

Starting point is 00:02:29 and ran on vacuum tubes, as the transistor hadn't been invented yet. The primary use for computers was to do complex calculations for things like ballistic missiles or atomic bomb testing, which would be too difficult and time-consuming for humans to do by hand. As a 25-year-old engineer just starting out, Doug Engelbart had an astonishing flash of insight into what computers could possibly be. In the interview we did years later with Wired Magazine, he said, quote, all of a sudden, wham, I got an image of myself sitting at a big CRT screen with all kinds of symbols on it, new and different ones manipulated by a computer that could be operated through various input devices.

Starting point is 00:03:07 All of the material on the screen could be controlled with great flexibility. Other people had their display units tied to the same computer complex, and you could connect them. Everyone could share knowledge. The vision unfolded rapidly in about a half an hour, and suddenly the potential of interactive collaborative computing became totally clear. End quote. Given the ubiquity of computing power today, it's hard to understand just how far-fetched this vision was at the time. Computers were expensive, and computing time was extremely valuable. The idea of wasting precious computer time manipulating objects on a screen would have come across as ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:03:44 Moreover, in 1951, TV sets weren't even that common yet. Only 23% of U.S. households had a television at that time. So, the idea of using a computer for anything other than just raw number crunching back in 1951 was in the realm of pure science fiction. Doug quit his job at the NACA and enrolled in the Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1955, you got his PhD on a topic that really had nothing to do with computers, and eventually wound up at a private R&D firm called the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI.

Starting point is 00:04:17 While at SRI, Doug began to hone his ideas on human computer interactions. In his vision, computers wouldn't just be used for calculation. Rather, they would be used to augment the human intellect. He saw teams of people working collaboratively on computers that were linked together. He saw computers handling the grunt work for searching for information, which was otherwise time-consuming. In 1962, he put his ideas together in a seminal paper titled Augmenting Human Intellect, a conceptual framework. One of the big themes of the paper was using network computers to allow humans to work on collaborative problem-solving. The ideas put forth in this paper

Starting point is 00:04:54 expanded and provided a more concrete path for ideas put forward years earlier in Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay, as we may think. These ideas were great, but unless they could be implemented, they would remain just that, ideas. Doug Engelbart, however, wanted to make his ideas a reality. So in 1963, he began looking for funding to set up his own lab to investigate human computer symbiosis. He received money from NASA, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the U.S. Air Force. With this, he opened up the Augmentation Research Center within the Stanford Research Institute. He and his team began to work on what was called the online system, or NLS. And just to explain, because it's sort of a confusing acronym, the NL comes from the NL in online.

Starting point is 00:05:43 And I have no idea why they named it that, but NLS it was. The team worked for five years, developing working methods of graphical user interfaces for computers. They experimented with various computer input devices. They created a system where users could work together on a document in different facilities. Everything they did was designed to humanize the computer to make it easy for people to use. All of their work came to fruition in December of 1968. It was time to show everyone exactly what he had been talking about for years. He was given a 90-minute keynote presentation at the annual computer science conference of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was to take place in a 2000-seat auditorium.

Starting point is 00:06:28 This demo of the NLS system was a huge risk. If you've ever given a live demonstration of computer software, you know why. Things can go wrong, and computers can crash. If this demo flopped, Engelbart's lab could lose funding, and the entire project would be set back for years. The trick for this demo is that computers were still really big. He couldn't just get on stage with a desktop computer because those didn't exist yet. He was going to be on stage in San Francisco in front of a console,

Starting point is 00:06:56 but the computer was going to be 30 miles away in Menlo Park. The connection between the two facilities was two custom-built 1,200-baud modems, and the computer everything was running on was a scientific data system's SDS 940 computer. Television cameras were set up in both San Francisco and in Menlo Park with a custom microwave connection between the two locations to share the video signal. They even had a four-channel video controller so they could project Doug's face mixed in with the monitors on the screen in the hall. The screen images literally came from a camera pointed at the computer monitor.

Starting point is 00:07:30 The 90-minute presentation totally changed the course of computer history. Doug demonstrated the first graphical user interface. He showed working hyperlinks. He demonstrated the concept of a floating window. He showed the world's first word processor and the ability to edit and delete text in real time. He showed how he could copy and paste text and move it around the screen. He and a colleague back in Menlo Park jointly worked on a single document in different. locations on the same computer. He was able to move around the screen because of a device he and his

Starting point is 00:08:01 team created which allowed you to manipulate objects on a screen with your hand. They called it a mouse. He also announced that within a few months, SRI was going to become the second node in a new network called ARPANET, the predecessor of a little thing we like to call the internet. When the demo ended and the lights came on, everyone in the audience was standing and cheering. After years of just talking about it, Doug Engelbart was finally able to show people what he meant, and once they could see it, everyone understood immediately. Prior to this demonstration, many people in the world of computer science thought that Doug Engelbart was a crackpot, because nobody could understand what he was trying to do. In an hour and a half, he went from Madman to genius. The immediate impact of the

Starting point is 00:08:46 demonstration in the world of computer science, however, was almost nothing. What Engelbart and his team had done was so far ahead of everyone else, they couldn't adopt these things even if they wanted to. They were still in a world of punch cards. Doug's team eventually drifted apart, and many of them got positions at other companies. In particular, many of them went to work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Park. In 1973, almost five years after Doug Engelbart's demo, Xerox released the first computer designed with a graphical user interface, the Xerox Alto. It could be considered the world's first personal computer, albeit one that was the size of a small cabinet. Xerox improved on many of the ideas for NLS and also built a better mouse.

Starting point is 00:09:31 In 1979 visit, Xerox Park was the source of inspiration for Steve Jobs to create a computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface called the Macintosh. Today, you can see the world's first computer mouse, which was used in the demonstration, which was nothing more than a hollow block of wood, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In his 1994 book Insanely Great, journalist Stephen Levy dubbed Engelbart's presentation, The Mother of All Demos. The entire demo was recorded and is still available for viewing on YouTube. In 2000, Engelbart was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the highest technical award of the United States. Douglas Engelbart passed away in 2013 at the age of

Starting point is 00:10:11 88. He lived long enough to see his ideas turned into reality. His ideas of what a computer could be, long before it was even possible to implement, became the basis of how almost every person on earth interacts with a computer today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon.

Starting point is 00:10:42 If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes. If in your office you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsible, responsive, instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you drive from that? Well, this basically characterizes what we've been pursuing for many years in what we've

Starting point is 00:11:23 called the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. We're going to try our best to show you rather than tell you about this program.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Mother of All Demos (Encore)

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