The Mothers of the Mother of All Demos

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as 'von Neumann architecture'...

Also, if you're interested in that sort of thing, the book "From Dits to Bits" by Herman Lukoff is a good read from an engineer in the trenches. Seems that it's now available on the Internet Archive: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4436586M/From_dits_to_bits

That's a fair point. I added this footnote to the piece in the same spirit:

> The report helped popularize the term “Von Neumann architecture” as a way to denote computers that store programs in memory. The term and the original paper are both controversial because they both fail to acknowledge Von Neumann’s peers and predecessors. Although this seems to be an accident of history, the influence of Von Neumann’s first draft is undeniable.

Sound good?

The article is a little unclear about this. The Telstar satellites made it possible for IBM to send digital data but it would also stream analog video.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar

Certainly analog. The collaborative video/audio features would not have been practical in 1968. But all of the interactive computing concepts were indeed happening in real time.

There were no satellites involved, and yes it was purely analogue. They did build most of the equipment themselves, the hardware to connect the computers to the video equipment.

But let Douglas Engelbart explain it by himself: "we leased two microwave lines, up from our laboratory at SRI, up in Menlo Park, so it’s roughly 30 miles, and it took two dish antennas on the roof there, four of them on a truck up on SkyLine, and two on the roof of the conference center”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=19m50s

Edit: btw, a few seconds later he mentions Bill English: “but anyway it worked, and the main reason it worked is because Bill English is a genius”.