📼🎬 The Mother of All Demos

The full recording runs about an hour and forty minutes. I watched the highlights, perhaps twenty-five minutes, on the Saturday I wrote the note on 📰 As We May Think, because I wanted to see what Bush's imaginary desk looked like once somebody had built some of it.

A conference hall in San Francisco, December 1968. A calm man in a headset sits at a console and shows a working system his lab has been living in. In one sitting the audience sees, for the first time in public:

• a pointer on the screen moved by a small wooden box with wheels under it,
• text you can fold up into headings and open again,
• a word in one document that jumps to another when you select it,
• a colleague thirty miles away, his face in a corner of the screen, editing the same file.

He demonstrates it with a shopping list. Bananas, sorted under produce. Fifty-seven years later I am doing the same thing with a statistics course.

What struck me

• He is not showing a computer. He is showing a group of people thinking together with one. The machine is the least of it.
• Every feature I spent four rebuilt systems arranging was on that screen before my mother left school. The tools were never the missing part.
• It is slow, grey and occasionally breaks, and he does not apologise once.

Belongs in 04. 🗃️ Notes & Writing, under the heading where I keep reminding myself to stop building.