68 demo Changing the world.

What we need to convey: What was it? How did it come about? What was shown, who were inspired by it?

Mood: The mood of this one has to be positive, up-beat and in a way, a bit reverential - the audience is about to see what this whole thing has been leading up to.

Background: The demo presents interactive computing to the world for the firs time and inspires generations of IT professionals to build what we have today - and still there is more that what was shown which is not available today.

This is a very lively and upbeat section, with many of the pioneers talking about what they did (if we get them, we have Jeff and may get Bill English). We will see the original places and systems they worked on. The 1968 demo will be shown in part and the way the system worked will be shown graphically.

The system by 1968: NLS by now had a full set of basic features that have since characterized it and AUGMENT (its commercial successor). E.g.: full-screen, integrated outline and text processing; in-file addressing; in-file and cross-file text or structure manipulation by address; basic repertoire of view-control commands; content filtering; generalized, computer-executable citation links; verb-noun, consistent command syntax with optional use of ultra-fast, concurrent control using the mouse and chord keyset; Included also was a calculator package, integrated into NLS: mouse-selecting operands; totaling columns; inserting accumulator contents at selected locations or replacing selected numbers in a file; executing user macros with pauses and prompts for users to select file variables or provided typed in values. Put together our home-designed, custom-built displays system to run with the SDS-940. Two custom-built, random-deflection display generators were each time-shared to drive six, small, 5" high-precision CRTs. In front of each of these CRTs was mounted a high-quality, video camera so as to scan the CRT face. These twelve video lines were brought out to our work area, where each work station had a high-quality video monitor for its display. This gave us four sizes of alphanumeric characters, and accelerators vector-graphic figures. The display generators were connected on a Direct Memory Access bus so that switching from one stored view to another occurred essentially in a thirtieth of a second. We came online with an improved NLS on a time-shared, SDS 940; large swapping drum; special, home-made display system operating from direct-memory access, providing integrated text and graphics, and delivering video to up to twelve workstations out in our laboratory.

Historical Context: The same year, 1968, Intel was founded. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. A year later people would land on the moon. Heady days. Hippies with counter-culture & revolution, technology and the promise of progress. We will leave the third episode quite excited; so this is how it came about; a man and his team built the mouse, hypertext, windows and all that against the odds of an establishment who saw computers as big old calculating machines. The real revolutionaries of the sixties were not the hippies protesting, the people building the technology which would change our world.

Interviewee's: Doug, Jeff Rulifson and Taylor

Visuals: The demo. Maybe the demo hall? City conference center downtown. Can't find out where it was on the net. Doug doesn't remember. He says I will have to ask Bill.

: The decades' hard work culminates in a big demo during the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference (a semi-annual joint meeting of the then major computing societies) held in San Francisco. At a special session Doug operated his system from the stage through a home-made modem, and used the system (called NLS at the time, for oNLine System) to outline and then concretely illustrate his ideas to the audience while members of his staff (with their faces shown on the screen) linked in from his lab at SRI. A standing ovation concluded this "mother of all demos," the first public demonstration of the computer mouse, of hypermedia, and of on-screen video teleconferencing.   It was a spectacular success influencing a generation of computer scientists.

Bill English and I wrote a paper for this conference describing ARC's objectives, physical laboratory, and the current features of NLS. In the Spring, when the Program Committee was considering candidate papers and organizing its sessions, I also proposed that they let us have a full hour-and-a-half session to put on a video-projected, real-time presentation. After considerable deliberation, and no less than two site visits to our lab at SRI, they consented.

It was a considerable gamble, possibly an outright misuse of research funding. I have no illusions that it could possibly have been pulled off without Bill English's genius for getting things to work. Our new display system provided us with twelve video cameras; we left about half of them working as display generators, and used the others to provide video views of people, borrowing tripods and drafting all kinds of people as camera operators and prompters.

We leased two video links to send images from SRI to the Conference Center in San Francisco -- a direct distance of about 30 miles. It required temporarily mounting four pairs of dishes -- two atop our SRI building, two atop the Conference hall, and four on a truck parked on top of a relay mountain. We procured some video-lab equipment: frame splitters, switches, faders, and mixers. We made special electronics to get our mouse and other terminal signals from the podium to the 940 at SRI.

It required a special video projector, whose rental included a specialist from New York to set it up and operate it. He proved invaluable in making other things work that day, too. Two cameras were mounted on the stage where I sat at the special work station (which the Herman Miller Company had made for us, and donated).

I was on-stage as anchor man during the continuous, 90-minute presentation, and Bill sat in the canvas-enclosed, raised booth at the back of the auditorium, directing the participants according the the script that I had prepared. People in our laboratory had key roles, and Bill coordinated us all via a voice intercom; while he also did the switching and mixing and frame splitting to put together the projected images.

During that 90 minutes, we used the projected display images (composite text & graphics) both to present agendas and descriptive portrayals, and also to demonstrate what NLS could do and how we applied it to our planning, documenting, source-code development, business management, and document retrieval.