Those who fail to understand the past,

Garrett Fitzgerald posted “The Mother of all Demos. A recent Slashdot post calls this “The Mother of all Demos”, and I’m inclined to agree. I didn’t realize that mouse-based computing was almost as old as I am. ”

UPDATE: The original site was taken down by Stanford, and the Internet Archive site above has Flash Player videos, which should no longer be run for security reasons. Wikipedia has an extensive article on TMOAD, and the Doug Englebart Institute a far better video presentation.

I’m really pleased to see history sites like this out there. There’s very little new under the sun, not even in computing. I explained to a fellow developer recently that I was using “Instant Messaging” and “Chat Rooms” on a GE-635 mainframe back in 1976, and that I was printing a publishing document from a GUI using scalable fonts and Postscript output, in 1988.

Now, has anyone got a good link to Alan Kay’s DynaBook videos?

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.