https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-as-we-know-it-turns-50-1543786471
San Francisco in 1968 was littered with flower children, free love and dreams of utopia encapsulated in Timothy Leary’s exhortation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” How wrong that was! But out of this purple haze rose that year’s Joint Computer Conference, where an assembly of geniuses wearing white short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors convened 50 years ago this week. The event shined a guiding light on the path to personal computing and set the modern world in motion.
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.
At the time, the data line Engelbart used for the demo probably cost more than 10 grand a month. And he needed an amazing amount of not-yet-invented science to back up his vision: The first internet transmission wasn’t sent until the next year, when a message was sent from a UCLA lab to a terminal at the Stanford Research Institute. The integrated circuit was invented 10 years earlier, but Engelbart would be considered a false prophet today if the microprocessor hadn’t come along a few years later. He saw where the technology was headed and helped to hurry it up.
The coolest thing about this story is that, starting 20 years ago, Doug Engelbart was my next-door neighbor. We would invite him to our parties and get invited to his. At his place I got to meet the tech hall of fame: In the living room I met Ted Nelson, who conceptualized hypertext, and I met the inventor of the disk drive in his kitchen.
One of Engelbart’s biggest influences was Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which envisioned a “memex” machine—a portmanteau of “memory” and “index”—that would enhance human cognition. While I chased my kids’ errant basketballs in his backyard, Doug would tell me about this sort of “human augmentation,” arguing that computer science was developing in ways that would aid humans, not replace them. Networks of humans and computers would create a “collective IQ.” He would interlock his fingers to make sure I got the point.
So what have we learned in 50 years?
First, augmenting humans is the purpose of technology and ought not be feared. Engelbart described the possibilities in a 1970 paper. “There will emerge a new ‘marketplace,’ representing fantastic wealth in commodities of knowledge, service, information, processing, storage,” he predicted. “In the number and range of transactions, and in the speed and flexibility with which they are negotiated, this new market will have a vitality and dynamism as much greater than today’s as today’s is greater than the village market.” Today Google is Memex 1.0, while Amazon and a whole world of e-commerce have realized the digital market.
Second, for inventors and investors, the thing about the future is that you get to see it for a long time coming. For a while the next big thing looks far off; it’s too expensive, and most people don’t believe it. Think about it. Fifty years before the demo, men in top hats signed a peace treaty ending World War I; 50 years after it is now. Even exponential change is imperceptible at first. The Stanford Research Institute proved this. They owned the computer-mouse patent and licensed it to Apple for, as Engelbart put it, “something like $40,000.”
Another lesson is that ideas aren’t products. Innovation requires iteration. In 1980 Steve Jobs hired design firm Hovey-Kelley to create Apple’s version of the mouse. It took 27 prototypes and probably hundreds if not thousands of iterations to get to the mouse you use today.
What else? Well, progress clearly hasn’t slowed. Sure, today’s culture is “Plug in, scroll down, tune out.” But imagine if Doug Engelbart could see a Google Waymo self-driving car breeze past his house today. I guarantee his mind would be blown even though he would probably understand exactly how it worked. For some reason, most of us today have become impossible to impress: Ho-hum, what has Google done for me lately?
Engelbart died in 2013 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. His daughter recalls him saying, “All the more reason to get working on boosting our collective IQ so we can get better at solving these complex, urgent problems!” That is exactly what the next 50 years should be about.
