The Demo | Hacker News Reader

The Demo

sloan.stanford.edu

232 pointssturadnidge36 comments

Reflecting on the fact that this video was recorded before the unix epoch was humbling.

This led me to wonder why 1970-01-01 is the Unix epoch. Answer: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1090869/578288. In short, Unix was developed in 1969 and first released in 1971.

Main Engelbart discussion going right now on HN (in case it drops off): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986307

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

^ Youtube link to the demo, as I can't get the video on the site to work.

EDIT: better quality version

Archive.org has this video, too, and lets you download it: http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCnt...

Also, this demo has a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

I absolutely love all the buzzing and whirring in the video. Combined with the fairly heavy reverberations of his voice, it's almost ethereal.

I was actually thinking about writing something to generate these computery sounds as I work. :)

Drop everything, and do it now. I need this :)

I read "1968" as "!986" and when looking at it again, still read "1986"...as in, the mouse was a pretty big deal back in 1986, from what I barely remember. But 1968? My mental picture is just circuit boards and punch cards. How amazing this technology must have seemed.

Well....Sutherland's SketchPad demo was done in 1963.

The SketchPad demo is just amazing. Whenever I work with a crappy interface I think about SketchPad and wonder how we collectively haven't set higher standards for the way we interact with computers.

The interesting thing is how much this was straining technology at the time, and how it predated the innovations (such as microprocessors) which would make this sort of thing not just feasible but inexpensive enough for many folks to make use of it in the home.

Did anyone else notice that the "word processor" demoed here is really more of a flexible outliner, like WorkFlowy ( http://www.workflowy.com )? Actually, the more features he ran through, the more I was struck by the similarity.

It is things like this that show why every college should have a history of CS course.

Wow hearing him explain the concept of a mouse to a room full of people who may or may not be convinced that computers are the future is really interesting.

One of the most important demos in tech next to the invention of fire and the iPod

love the wit

posting this before someone inevitably rails against your obviously genuine belief that the iPod was the greatest invention ever. X_X

That's sarcasm.

Way more important than iPod

Whenever I've watched this, I've stopped it several times and just tried to think of/like the people in the audience. What were they thinking? What previous and familiar techniques and technologies were they using as the lens to see this through? If you had them brainstorm in small groups about how they could use this if they had it for the next year, what would they think it was good for? Is it something they saw as useful for themselves or just for record-keepers and report writers?

And reflecting on this demo, today's XKCD is nice: http://xkcd.com/1234/

This reminded me of the original presentation of the iPhone, which I didn't watch until recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8

Points of similarity:

1. Both presentations happened in San Francisco (at the same convention center?)

2. Both demonstrate major advances in user interfaces

3. Both include demonstrations of remote communication :)

Other than the fact that they are both demos and happened in SF (in different locations, Brooks hall has been closed for many years), they're almost entirely dissimilar.

One is a demonstration of new technologies, previously unseen by many in the audience. The other is the introduction of a new product integrating many existing technologies. You could buy an iPhone a few months after that introduction. Computers with mice didn't become generally available to consumers till 1984. You're either underestimating the impact of Engelbart's demo, overestimating the importance of the iPhone or both.

I'm going to disagree and say that Jobs' unveiling of the iPhone will be up there with The Demo in terms of watershed moments in computer, and indeed human history. It wasn't the iPhone per se, but what the iPhone represented and the clear inflection point it has proven to be for realizing much of the vision originally hatched by those at PARC.

That is ridiculous. Please, have some imagination. In preparation of The Demo, just think about the algorithms that were discovered and technologies that were invented.

Unveiling of iPhone was a marketing gimmick. And please look outside America before talking about human history, and indeed computer.

I really don't want to sound rude but this kind of vanity gets to me.

So you're basically rude and provide no real argument.

You did happen to notice how much the world transformed after the iPhone came out along with the rest of us, didn't you? You do remember that to paraphrase Alan Kay it was a few inches short of someone finally realizing the Dynabook? (And you do know that the iPad came before the iPhone, likely from this very inspiration?)

I find it bizarre that you somehow conclude that saying the iPhone was a very transformative product for the world is somehow "vanity." Strange.

> (And you do know that the iPad came before the iPhone, likely from this very inspiration?)

...er, what?

Internally at Apple the iPad was in development before the iPhone. The iPad is considerably closer to the Dynabook as a concept than the iPhone is.

> And please look outside America before talking about human history, and indeed computer.

You're too harsh on the OP. As Doug Engelbart discovered himself at some point: "One of the basic things you soon learn is that after a certain degree of quantitative change, you almost invariably go into qualitative change." (http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...).

Before Apple put everything together for the initial version of the iPhone nobody else other than technology enthusiasts (or masochists) were using their mobile phones as windows into the world. Not 10 years have passed and now I can see 12-year kids chatting with their friends on their iPhone5s while I'm taking the tramway home, or 20-something lady-drivers checking their Facebook while they're waiting for the green light.

If it matters I live half a globe-away from the States, and while I do own an iPhone 4 I still fondly remember how I used to write Python scripts for a Nokia N73 that would somehow try to pair the images I was taking with said phone with the geo-coordinates recorded by an external GPS device, both of them (the GPS device and the phone) connected through bluetooth.

> "windows onto the world"

People were emailing each other and secure IM'ing in 1999 on BlackBerries, I think you forget there was "internet phones" before the iPhone in 2007. This wasn't some "geek machine" it was something every wallstreet, government employee and exec had.

> what the iPhone represented

A mish-mash of other technologies available on the market? I don't doubt that it had a an impact on technology but it wasn't some epiphany, just a good iteration.

I think you need to dedicate the next 1.40.53hrs of your day to watching The Mother of All Demo's, it truly is one of the most amazing human technological feats - to even conceive these things let alone manage to produce and develop them and then demonstrate to a large audience and record the whole thing still blows my mind. Pretty much everything you are doing today on your laptop harks back to Dougs boundless imagination and execution, he deserves total utmost respect - not comparison. There is none, let alone with a phone.

I can see solid arguments for either viewpoint. The iPhone was certainly a substantial leap, but a lot of innovation was happening at the time in smartphones elsewhere and it was really just a matter of time before the advances and improvements made by Apple were duplicated by others. However, there is something which I think tips the balance toward the iPhone being a major breakthrough: the expansion of the smartphone market.

The iPhone brought a lot of new smartphone users into the market, and it brought an even larger injection of cash into the market. That, in turn, facilitated a massive acceleration of R&D into mobile device technology and software. And that acceleration will have a direct impact on something that is still in progress and hasn't happened yet: the majority of the population of the developing world gaining access to computing technology and the internet, which I believe will be one of the defining events of the 21st century.

I have some trouble seeing how Engelbart's demo wasn't just integrating many existing technologies. For example, live television had existed for decades, so teleconferencing would seem like a small leap. While Engelbart's team did independently[1] invent the mouse, Apple made the first consumer mouse, and by also inventing drag gestures, they didn't have to go with the frankly shitty UI suggested by Engelbart.

1. Telefunken was selling a mouse several weeks before this demo -- http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Auf-den-Spuren-der-de...

[This comment has been edited a couple of times]

The Engelbart demo is about as much about teleconferencing as the iPhone introduction is just about a nicer mobile phone.

And I think both the original and my reply were about the demos themselves not about the mouse specifically or Apple in general. My point was that a technology demo of a research prototype and a product introduction are radically different things. I suspect that Engelbart's demo itself must have been a very early, (the first?) large-scale, live demonstration of interactive computer technology. They had to borrow an Eidophor from NASA to do it, which gives an idea of how unusual it was for the time. It's not like they showed up and plugged a coax cable into the projection system of the convention hall. That's one, among many reasons why one of these things is The Demo and the other a demo.

> Engelbart's demo itself must have been a very early, (the first?) large-scale, live demonstration of interactive computer technology.

Teletypes had been commercially available for decades, and minicomputers (PDP-8) for about four years. It seems glass terminals started appearing only a year before this demo, though.

Have you watched the demo? Or looked up what an Eidophor is? This is pretty much the invention of the 'computer demo in front of a big, live audience'. I have no idea what teletypes have to do with any of this.

Obviously I haven't been understanding what you're tring to say. From your most recent comment, I think you're saying that the groundbreaking thing was showing a computer screen through an eidophor in order to demonstrate its functions live before a large audience.

With this in mind, I will claim that the iPhone demonstration is similar in that it's the first case of a phone being connected to a big screen projector to demonstrate its functions live before a large audience.

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