Watching A Seminal Moment In Computing

Through the wonders of the Internet, it’s now possible to watch one of the most important moments in the history of computing, one from when the Internet was just a twinkle in Defense Department’s eye.

Doug Engelbart’s demo was showing his work from 1968(!!!) where he outlined such as cut-and-paste, the first ever computer mouse, hyperlinks, networking, video-conferencing… and at the end he even mentions the “coming Arpanet in about a year, end up with some 20 experimental computers in a network… with bandwidth of something like 20kbps” (of course, Arpanet eventually became the Internet we know today).

The full set of videos is listed here but if you want to watch them all in sequence, I’ve stuck together a SMIL file with them all in.