Great article from the WSJ, worth reading. I met Doug Engelbart 24 years ago in Scotland. He was the most modest, well-mannered genius I’ve ever met (impossible to imagine him ever self-promoting on social media hoping for attention and likes), the epitome of a scholar and a gentleman. He really did invent the world we live in but is almost forgotten by today’s ‘designers’ (the term is becoming so irritating in current use that I’ve to put it in quotation marks….ooops, Doug would never have been sarcastic either).
Here’s the opening para, full link below.
On Dec. 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute presented what’s now known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Using a homemade modem, a video feed from Menlo Park, and a quirky hand-operated device, Engelbart gave a 90-minute demonstration of hypertext, videoconferencing, teleconferencing and a networked operating system. Oh, and graphical user interface, display editing, multiple windows, shared documents, context-sensitive help and a digital library. Mother of all demos is right. That quirky device later became known as the computer mouse. The audience felt as if it had stepped into Oz, watching the world transform from black-and-white to color. But it was no hallucination.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-as-we-know-it-turns-50-1543786471