The Mother of All Demos

"The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968 computer demonstration 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 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." Andy 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.

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