You can watch a 90-minute movie, read a few chapters of the novel you started over the weekend, take a good walk to disconnect, or, if you’re Douglas Engelbart, give a lecture that envisions the computer’s future paths. The rest of the century, so savage, so glorious, visionary, or directly prophetic speech—Etiquette is the least!—more than half a century later, it is still remembered as the “mother of all spectacle.”

90 minutes, This much. What you need to do Plum Pie chocolate.

In 1968, Engelbart, an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), faced a dilemma. If his career could be compared to a poker game, we could say it’s time for him to set up a manual all-in, play or do it all or nothing.

With his team at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI, he had been developing the on-Line System for several years, a system that facilitates computing and even collaboration. Among other tools, it included resources such as hypertext links, graphical user interfaces or hardware that made it simple to use.

With the image of flashy mainframes and punch cards still in their pituitary glands, Engelbart’s team was committed to an ambitious goal: to make the computer more cost-effective, simpler, and more practical, which in a way would help. expand human capabilities.

play all or nothing

And they weren’t bad in the effort. “Instead of punch cards, the Online System featured a radar-like display with a graphical user interface (GUI) where the user manipulated text, symbols, and video in a series of overlapping “windows” to add, delete, and move text in a document,” notes Smithsonian. The tool even allowed several people to work on one document at the same time.

As part of this bizarre challenge for computing simplicity, Staford also the easiest things to users.

In the ARC, for example, they took the form of various prototype “controls” to operate the equipment, including a “chord keyboard” that complemented the QWERTY, one controlled by a light pen and knee, and a wooden block supplied with a cable. and the wheel, which earned the nickname “mouse” because of its distinctive rodent-like appearance. Yes, it’s more or less the Cro-Magnon of mice that were included with Xerox and Apple computers shortly after, and which you still use in your PC today.

All this was great, but in the background, Engelbart and his staff were faced with a problem that was almost as difficult as developing new hardware: How are such works made visible?

Bob Taylor, SRI engineer and director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), one of its leading financial backers, has found a solution. It wasn’t groundbreaking, or even slightly original, but it could work: display all that luggage in one of the industry’s largest showcases, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in late 1968.

It could be a bell if it goes well. If things went wrong… Well, if things got complicated, they’d have a resounding professional boom that would devalue what they’ve been doing for years, and that’s what’s dangerous. will jeopardize any future financing.

So no pressure.

“We took a big risk,” Engelbart later recalled.

Eager to grill all the meat, they requested a special session during the San Francisco convention in March 1968, and the dice were rolled: their speech was to be held on December 9 of the same year at Brooks Hall, a 2,000-seat venue. . The title of the talk suggested where the shots would go:A Research Center for Developing Human Intelligence“.

It may seem strange to us today, but the challenge for Engelbart and his team wasn’t just playing all or nothing, calming the nerves and polishing the message nicely. The conference itself represented a technological challenge in itself. They couldn’t have been shy about the budget if they wanted to show their capabilities and how revolutionary it was: Throw the house out the window.

From the very beginning, the team needed to connect the auditorium where Engelbart would intervene in San Francisco in December to the SRI offices where his team worked and the mainframe in Menlo Park, about 30 miles from there. .

The ARC team spent months putting together the infrastructure, installing cameras in the SRI and the auditorium, getting antennas, transmitters, a microwave link and a homemade modem so that commands from Engelbart’s console could be transmitted to Menlo Park.

The bill that ARPA paid was $175,000. total more than respect for time. A demonstration of “virguerías” – you see, the year 1968 – so that the engineer, with the support of 17 ARC employees, was able to demonstrate what the On-Line System can do.

By December 9, 1968 the system was perfectly calibrated. And of course the nerves surface. Nearly 44 years old, Engelbart gained experience in companies, at university, led his own team and even during World War II. participated in World War II; but that day in San Francisco he felt as if the devil had taken possession of him – he himself admitted.

“All in”.

Today’s recording of the conference may seem old-fashioned, pre-Diluvial, such as those showing Neil Armstrong striding across the grainy surface of the Moon, but what Engelbart’s contemporaries saw with increasing astonishment was, a true genius show.

During the 90 minutes, when nothing but his explanations were heard in the hall, the engineer talked about bridges, video conferencing, shared documents and collaboration, windows-based graphical interfaces, word processors or graphics.

In a culmination, he announced—remember at the National Museum of American History—that SRI was about to become the second node of ARPANet, the precursor to the Internet as we know it today. In 90 minutes, come on, take a good nap, the Stanford engineer had it mapped out. some keys computing for the rest of the century.

And it’s all colored by demonstrations where computer science is part of the daily bread today, but at the time it looked almost like a science fiction scene, like computer mice.

Continuing with the poker analogy, Engelbart confirmed that his bet was good when he finished: his colleagues’ applause began to roar as he stopped speaking in the auditorium. “people were surprised”, would explain one of his colleagues from SRI, William English, decades later. New York Times: “In an hour he defined the modern computer age.”

Just because Engelbart and his other collaborators at SRI were able to see things in life and even show the way doesn’t mean they were called upon to advocate for their development.

Shortly after his 1968 talent show, the team began to falter in driving. Some of the staff questioned the lab’s direction, funding was lost, other talent centers emerged, such as Xerox in Palo Alto (PARC)… And, quite simply, some people who worked with Engelbart eventually started looking for new talent. destinations, taking what I learned with it.

For a while, many people really believed that the mouse was a Xerox invention. They are not the ones responsible for taking the next step. does not shy away from them.

The senior engineer not only drew a large part of the 20th century’s calculation for biblical prophetic purposes; It has also helped many people change the image of computing, and perhaps this is equally relevant: stop seeing it as an inaccessible, gigantic, complex, world full of enterprise machines and designed only for leading labs and firms, and move on. to understand as useful tool for workers’ day.

It’s not a weapon. It’s not a complicated gear. Nor as a way to replace human effort. No. A complement is a way to take talent a little further, to push the boundaries. As he already proceeded in the title of his speech: “A Research Center for Developing Human Intelligence“.

“If you had a computer-assisted display in your office that is active for you all day and responds instantly to all your actions, how much value would you get from it?” Engelbart hooked his audience, who fell from 68.