Today in 1968, Doug Engelbart demonstrated the oNLine System (NLS) to about one thousand attendees at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held by the American Federation of Information Processing.
The demonstration introduced the first computer mouse, hypertext linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, real-time on-screen text editing, and shared-screen teleconferencing. Engelbart and his colleague Bill English, the engineer who designed the first mouse, conducted a real-time demonstration in San Francisco with co-workers connected from his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI's headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.
The inventions demonstrated were developed to support Engelbart's vision of solving humanity's most important problems by harnessing computers as tools for collaboration and the augmentation of our collective intelligence.
The presentation later became known as “the mother of all demos,” first called so by Steven Levy in his 1994 book, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything.
His demo was a tectonic shift in the computing industry. Doug ended up being very obscure. Apple made a fortune off his inventions. Doug had plenty of opportunities to cash in and decided not to because he was focused on his longer-term vision of augmenting human intellect. Doug is a long-distance thinker.