The Mother of All Demos unveiled the computer mouse
On this day · 9 December 1968
In 90 minutes in 1968, one engineer showed a stunned audience the mouse, hypertext, and video calls decades before anyone else.
On December 9, 1968, engineer Douglas Engelbart took the stage at Brooks Hall in San Francisco, before some 1,000 computer professionals at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. In about 90 minutes, he ran through ideas that would not become everyday tools for decades.
Working from Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with a geographically scattered team, Engelbart debuted the computer mouse, real-time interactive computing, a graphical interface, hypertext links, cut-copy-paste editing, multiple windows, shared-screen collaboration, and live video conferencing. The mouse itself had been prototyped at SRI in 1964 with engineer Bill English.
When it ended, the audience reportedly stood and cheered.
The session was so far ahead of its time that historians later christened it “the Mother of All Demos.” Much of what Engelbart sketched that afternoon, from clickable links to screen sharing, is now simply how computers work.
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