The Mother of all Demos

A number of years ago, in 1988, my brother and I were showing our first product, The Manhole, at the HyperExpo in San Francisco. We built The Manhole with a hypermedia tool called HyperCard, similar in many ways to today's web (at a time when the web didn't yet exist). HyperCard served, not only as the first wide-scale implementation of hypermedia, but also as an important precursor to the web.

While we were doing our thing, mostly just enjoying the Expo (it was our first intro to a software show), we couldn't help but notice an enigmatic group, run by one Ted Nelson, calling themselves Project Xanadu. They made themselves known by roaming the floor in mysterious black t-shirts, each t-shirt silk-screened with a large "X". How curious... like rebels amidst a HyperCard majority. Who were these men in black?

It might have been the first time I heard of the words hyperlink, hypertext or hypermedia . It was definitely the first I learned that the "link" concepts, so central to HyperCard, were not original inventions of Bill Atkinson. And it was the first I learned that these concepts, so central to today's web, were older than I was! 1965 to be exact... and the brainchild of aforementioned Mr. Ted Nelson, the leader of these Xanadu crusaders.

What I didn't know until recently, is that a stunted version of hypertext had been demonstrated as early as 1968. This was no run-of-the-mill boring-vision-of-the-future demo. This was, simply put, "The Mother of All Demos". Steven Levy first gave it that name and it seems to have stuck: The Mother of All Demos (and oh I really love that name). Douglas Engelbart's whirling vision of the future; it was the first public use of a mouse, as well as examples of cutting, copying, pasting, teleconferencing, video conferencing, email, and... hypertext. It's just too damn much for 1968!

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