This 90-Min Demo Changed The World!
It was the 1960s, an era when the Beatles were considered misfits in society and thought to be corrupting the minds of kids. Ford was proposing a nuclear-powered car. The computers that sent the first person to the moon were less powerful than a modern USB charger.
However, during this era, a small group of computer scientists were shown a 90-minute demo by a young man that was ‘over the clouds’ for them but seemed to revolutionise how we use tech today. This demo became the foundation of the Cupertino giant, the goliath we know today.
Intrigued? Let’s dive into it…
Augmented Dream:
During the Second World War, a young man named Doug Engelbart, a radar technician for the U.S. Navy was sailing through the sea as a routine exercise and came across the Atlantic magazine which was always fascinating for him to read. The electrical engineer from Oregon State University was then reading a piece from the mag written by Vannevar Bush named “As We May Think” & was encapsulated by the writing that mainly discussed how a network of computers can be employed by a graphical user interface. The piece was so etched on him that after the war, Engelbart went on to complete his doctorate in electrical engineering and later joined as a fellow at Stanford Research Institute (SRI; now SRI International) and what he did there would change the world in a way we never ever would have imagined. Engelbart was always a guy who was mostly engulfed in his own ideas and his passion towards Bush’s piece, he was mostly considered eccentric in the entirety of SRI. But his determination was widely appreciated for he was initiated with a fund which led to the foundation of his own laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) where he basically worked on the vision led by the writing. On 9th December 1968, he called around 100 computer scientists in front of whom he wanted to present a seemingly general 90-minute demo. But what he did demonstrate along with his colleague over at SRI, William English, was NLS — the oNLine System which introduced the concept of networked computers controlled by the world’s first graphical user interface (GUI) and also made strides in demonstrating features which have kept the foundation of modern computing like, cursor support, copy and paste, multiple window display, hyperlinks and live camera stream over the network which we might now call as ‘video call’. The demo outlined the next 50 years of computing but there were more than 16 years to come which made this technology the face of how we know computers today.
It got “Xerox”ed:
Even after the most astonishing 90-minute demo of the time, the embodiment of Engelbart’s work and Bush’s vision, it never took off. It had a lukewarm response at best, as the technology seemed too modern at the time, and computers were only meant for strict research and development use cases. The idea of a computer being in everyone’s hands was far from how scientists and entrepreneurs looked at computers of the time until 1984. But before that, due to the lack of interest of higher officials at Engelbart’s work, some of his colleagues at ARC left it and joined Xerox PARC (yeah, it rhymes), the research & development division of Xerox, the photocopier company. With those fellows, Xerox developed a modern rubric of a graphical user interface to which we are familiar today — multi-windows, icons, trash, the shenanigans, but didn’t know what to do with. While they might have struck gold with their creation, there was no way of selling it until they cracked a small visit for a young guy in his 20s who wanted to get inspired for his upcoming entrepreneurial expedition. It was none other than Steve Jobs himself, the man who made millions out of a motherboard with a keyboard which lucratively attracted many enthusiasts. But in pursuing a breakthrough in consumer electronics with his fruit company, he wanted something radical. And he found the radical when he visited the photocopiers. When he was demonstrated with the GUI, within ten minutes of interaction, young Steve was adamant about how it would be default for everyone using a computer in the next 50 years. However, the journey was not quite easy as Xerox didn’t give him complete access to the GUI and from then on, with a skilful set of engineers, Steve Jobs reverse-engineered the piece, which got him inspired and launched the Macintosh in January 1984, which was the first personal computer with the graphical user interface and it made history. A history that we are still experiencing today and which will inspire the next generation of experiences.
The Epilogue:
The world of tech that we now know and use was not built by a single man or company, rather it was the result of multiple stakeholders coming together through all stretches of life and experiences with the zeal of making something unique which was never heard before, either to make a name or to just make something they like. While many were the result of such culminations, some like the invention of the mouse and GUI discussed in this blog can be just credited to people being at the correct places at correct, otherwise, these technologies would have been lost forever or would be a piece of a science museum. History! A part of human life which never existed for some but changes how it changes our present and future. Crazy times to be alive! Signing off…
