Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Computer historians always downplay this major historical hingepoint for a few reasons, but usually because doing so helps conceal just how much the modern computer industry depends on technology which could only have been developed by the public sector.
It really is a shame he got kneecapped in his work.
Imagine if mechanical engineers were given the tools in the mother of all demos, and then given a decade to keep making them better, all green fields design, optimized around their productivity, and nothing else.
The key and ONLY measure would be how much work they could get done, an existing non-computer centric metric.
I can't even imagine how far we'd be beyond what can be done with AutoCad.
The human factors results could then be generalized to apply to other fields, and perhaps other bootstraps could have been done.
Instead of "one size fits all" mass software, there would be highly optimized tools that require a lot of skill to learn, but then multiply productivity by orders of magnitude.
There's no source code because the project wasn't funded. We still really don't know how productive an organization can be if they were able to tap the full power of a computer for their exact needs.
There must have been source code for the "mother of all demos", it would be fun to take a look at it if it was on Github. Maybe it no longer exists though.