The mother of all demos

Interesting fact: apparently the video was shot by Stewart Brand, who crops up at a surprisingly large number of other key points in the history of computer science (he created the Well, a highly influential early online community, and has some involvement with the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club which gave birth to Apple, among other things). These days he's running the Long Now Foundation. My girlfriend and I are convinced he's a time traveller from the future.

I remember coming across NLS (Englebart's system at SRI) in 1972-73, using it over the ARPAnet (there were about 20 nodes back then). Even then, without much contextual knowledge, and without special graphics consoles, it was clear that this was something special.

In some sense, it's still better than current shared-editing systems, an early and more structured Google Wave, if you will.

Very impressive.

Do not use url shorterners. Do not create a linkbaiting title.

That said, the demo by Doug Engelbart from 1968 (which is what you should have used as a title) is very impressive. I saw it ten years ago in my human-computer interaction course, and everyone was completely blown away by it then, and it's still very impressive.

I landed there too after a couple of hours surfing prompted by the Newsweek article.