Engelbart's 'Mother of All Demos' unveils the mouse
One 90-minute presentation shows the mouse, hypertext, and video conferencing years before any existed commercially
Quick facts
- Presenter
- Douglas Engelbart, Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
- Date
- 9 December 1968
- Location
- Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco
- System name
- oN-Line System (NLS)
What happened
At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart and his team from the Stanford Research Institute demonstrated their oN-Line System (NLS) to an audience of computer professionals. The demonstration gave the very first public look at the computer mouse, alongside hypertext linking between documents, real-time collaborative text editing, multiple on-screen windows with adjustable views, and shared-screen video conferencing between Engelbart on stage and a colleague back at SRI, thirty miles away. Engelbart had spent years pursuing a personal research goal of using computers to 'augment human intellect' rather than simply automate calculation.
Why it matters
Almost everything demonstrated that day, a pointing device, clickable links, overlapping windows, and video calls, became standard computing features only after Xerox PARC engineers, several of whom had worked with Engelbart, carried the ideas forward into the Alto computer in the early 1970s. Nothing shown was a product; it took over a decade for any of it to reach ordinary users.
How we know
SRI, Engelbart's own research institute, documents the 9 December 1968 date, the technologies shown, and the conference location in its own historical account of the demonstration.
Sources
- SRI International. 1968 "Mother of All Demos" Forecasted Much of the Technology We Use Every Day · General sourcesri.com · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Smithsonian Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. The Mother of All Demos · Reputable sourceinvention.si.edu · The domain "invention.si.edu" is on our Reputable source registry.
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Related timelines
- History of Video Games → · The mouse and windowed interface Engelbart demonstrated became standard PC input methods years before graphical adventure and strategy games depended on them.