“The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to
a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing
Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco
The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.
The first use of this name for Engelbart's talk is ascribed to journalist Steven Levy in his 1994 book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, where he describes the event as "a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos." Andries van Dam repeated the phrase in 1995 while introducing Engelbart at the Vannevar Bush Symposium at MIT. The phrase was also cited in John Markoff's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said.
The phrase "the mother of all battles," a translation of a warning in Arabic issued by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces, entered American popular culture in the months prior to the onset of the Gulf War in 1991. It came to be used as a snowclone, as a broadly applied hyperbolic term.
Much of Engelbart's thought that led to the development of his Augmentation Research Center (ARC), as well as the oN-Line System was derived from the "research culture" of World War II and the early Cold War. A notable source of inspiration to Engelbart was the article "As We May Think", written by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic magazine, which Engelbart read while stationed as a US Navy radar technician in thePhilippines
In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner gave voice to this view, which arose from seeing the unintended effects of technology on the postwar world:
This ultimately led to the idea that beyond merely performing calculations, computers could be used to augment the capabilities of the human mind.
Demonstration
Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers at his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) located inStanford
University San Francisco
The conference session was presented under the title A research center for augmenting human intellect. Approximately 1,000 computer professionals were in attendance in the auditorium to witness the presentation. Notable attendees in the audience included Alan Kay, Charles Irby and Andy van Dam, as well as Bob Sproull.
Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team, and with Bill English directing the presentation's technical elements, demonstrated NLS's functions. The presentation used an Eidophor video projector that allowed the video output from the NLS computer to be displayed on a large 6.7-metre high screen so the audience could see what Engelbart was doing. Additionally, live video of him and his associates from ARC in Menlo Park, about 48 kilometers (30 mi) away, was combined with the computer's output on the Eidophor. The Augment researchers also created two customized homemade modems at 1200 baud – high-speed for 1968 – linked via a leased line to transfer data from the computer workstation keyboard and mouse at the Civic Auditorium to their Menlo Park headquarter's SDS-940 computer. In order to provide live two-way video between the lab and the conference hall, two microwave links were used. English also commanded a video switcher that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator inMenlo
Park
During the 90-minute presentation, Engelbart used his mouse prototype to move around the screen, highlight text, and resize windows. This was the first time that an integrated system for manipulating text onscreen was presented publicly. Engelbart would simultaneously appear on a portion of the projected screen, along with the computer's output and then demonstrated collaborative editing and teleconferencing. At separate times, his Augment associates Jeff Rulifson and Bill Paxton appeared in another portion of the screen to help edit the text remotely from ARC. While they were editing they could see each other's screen, talk and see each other as well. He further demonstrated that clicking on underlined text would then link to another page of information, demonstrating the concept of hypertext.
When he finished the demonstration, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To further demonstrate the system, a separate room was set aside so that attendees could take a closer look at the NLS workstations and ask Engelbart questions. One last notion is that of Engelbart's NLS system. As Fred Turner stated in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture:
Influence
Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot." When he was finished, he was described as "dealing lightning with both hands." Van Dam was working on a similar system, but had only begun work on it in 1967, and was stunned to see how mature NLS was: he practically accosted Engelbart with his line of questioning in the post-presentation question and answer session. After he finished interrogating Engelbart, van Dam agreed the NLS demo was the greatest thing he ever witnessed. Van Dam would go on to become a leader in teaching computer graphics in the 1970s.
As the 1970s started, much of Engelbart's team departed ARC and went their own ways, with many of them ending up at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Among these people were Bill English, who would further improve upon the mouse. Also migrating to PARC was Engelbart's former backer at NASA and ARPA, Robert Taylor. Alan Kay, also in attendance at the demo, would go on to design an object-oriented computing environment called Smalltalk while he was at PARC.
By 1973, the Xerox Alto was a fully functional personal computer similar to the NLS terminal which Engelbart had demonstrated in 1968, but much smaller and physically refined. With its mouse driven GUI, the Alto would go on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple's Macintosh computer and operating system in the 1980s. Eventually, Microsoft's Windows operating system would follow the Macintosh and use a multi-button mouse like the Alto and the NLS system did. Engelbart's influence peaked at the conference, and he was mostly remembered throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s as the inventor of the mouse and hyper text, famously adapted by Apple and Microsoft. However, on the demo's 30th anniversary in 1998,Stanford University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.
Origin of the Phrase “Mother
of All Demos”
The first use of this name for Engelbart's talk is ascribed to journalist Steven Levy in his 1994 book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, where he describes the event as "a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos." Andries van Dam repeated the phrase in 1995 while introducing Engelbart at the Vannevar Bush Symposium at MIT. The phrase was also cited in John Markoff's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said.
The phrase "the mother of all battles," a translation of a warning in Arabic issued by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces, entered American popular culture in the months prior to the onset of the Gulf War in 1991. It came to be used as a snowclone, as a broadly applied hyperbolic term.
Background
Much of Engelbart's thought that led to the development of his Augmentation Research Center (ARC), as well as the oN-Line System was derived from the "research culture" of World War II and the early Cold War. A notable source of inspiration to Engelbart was the article "As We May Think", written by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic magazine, which Engelbart read while stationed as a US Navy radar technician in the
In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner gave voice to this view, which arose from seeing the unintended effects of technology on the postwar world:
[T]he American military had
developed technologies with which it might destroy the world. In its wake,
scientists and technologists had begun to fan out around the globe, seeking to
use their knowledge to eradicate disease and increase food production, often in
an effort to win the cold war loyalties of Third World
nations. Engelbart had read about these efforts and saw that they often
backfired. Rapid food production led to the depletion of the soil; the
eradication of insects led to ecological imbalances.
This ultimately led to the idea that beyond merely performing calculations, computers could be used to augment the capabilities of the human mind.
Demonstration
Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers at his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) located in
The conference session was presented under the title A research center for augmenting human intellect. Approximately 1,000 computer professionals were in attendance in the auditorium to witness the presentation. Notable attendees in the audience included Alan Kay, Charles Irby and Andy van Dam, as well as Bob Sproull.
Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team, and with Bill English directing the presentation's technical elements, demonstrated NLS's functions. The presentation used an Eidophor video projector that allowed the video output from the NLS computer to be displayed on a large 6.7-metre high screen so the audience could see what Engelbart was doing. Additionally, live video of him and his associates from ARC in Menlo Park, about 48 kilometers (30 mi) away, was combined with the computer's output on the Eidophor. The Augment researchers also created two customized homemade modems at 1200 baud – high-speed for 1968 – linked via a leased line to transfer data from the computer workstation keyboard and mouse at the Civic Auditorium to their Menlo Park headquarter's SDS-940 computer. In order to provide live two-way video between the lab and the conference hall, two microwave links were used. English also commanded a video switcher that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator in
During the 90-minute presentation, Engelbart used his mouse prototype to move around the screen, highlight text, and resize windows. This was the first time that an integrated system for manipulating text onscreen was presented publicly. Engelbart would simultaneously appear on a portion of the projected screen, along with the computer's output and then demonstrated collaborative editing and teleconferencing. At separate times, his Augment associates Jeff Rulifson and Bill Paxton appeared in another portion of the screen to help edit the text remotely from ARC. While they were editing they could see each other's screen, talk and see each other as well. He further demonstrated that clicking on underlined text would then link to another page of information, demonstrating the concept of hypertext.
When he finished the demonstration, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To further demonstrate the system, a separate room was set aside so that attendees could take a closer look at the NLS workstations and ask Engelbart questions. One last notion is that of Engelbart's NLS system. As Fred Turner stated in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture:
Engelbart promulgated a
philosophy of 'bootstrapping', in which each experimental transformation of the
socio-technical system that was the NLS would feed back into the system itself,
causing it to evolve (and presumably to improve).
Influence
Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot." When he was finished, he was described as "dealing lightning with both hands." Van Dam was working on a similar system, but had only begun work on it in 1967, and was stunned to see how mature NLS was: he practically accosted Engelbart with his line of questioning in the post-presentation question and answer session. After he finished interrogating Engelbart, van Dam agreed the NLS demo was the greatest thing he ever witnessed. Van Dam would go on to become a leader in teaching computer graphics in the 1970s.
As the 1970s started, much of Engelbart's team departed ARC and went their own ways, with many of them ending up at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Among these people were Bill English, who would further improve upon the mouse. Also migrating to PARC was Engelbart's former backer at NASA and ARPA, Robert Taylor. Alan Kay, also in attendance at the demo, would go on to design an object-oriented computing environment called Smalltalk while he was at PARC.
By 1973, the Xerox Alto was a fully functional personal computer similar to the NLS terminal which Engelbart had demonstrated in 1968, but much smaller and physically refined. With its mouse driven GUI, the Alto would go on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple's Macintosh computer and operating system in the 1980s. Eventually, Microsoft's Windows operating system would follow the Macintosh and use a multi-button mouse like the Alto and the NLS system did. Engelbart's influence peaked at the conference, and he was mostly remembered throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s as the inventor of the mouse and hyper text, famously adapted by Apple and Microsoft. However, on the demo's 30th anniversary in 1998,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
No comments:
Post a Comment