In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence:
“If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker
were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every
action you had, how much value could you derive from that?”
Engelbart developed many features of modern computing that we now take for granted: the mouse,1 hypertext, shared documents, windows,
and a graphical user interface.
At the 1968 Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart demonstrated these innovations in a groundbreaking presentation, now known as
“The Mother of All Demos.”

The keyset with my prototype USB interface.

Engelbart’s demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on.
The 5-finger keyset lets you type without moving your hand, entering characters by pressing multiple keys simultaneously as a chord.
Christina Englebart, his daughter, loaned one of Engelbart’s keysets to me.
I constructed an interface to connect the keyset to USB, so that it can be used with a modern computer.
The video below shows me typing with the keyset, using the mouse buttons to select upper case and special characters.2

I wrote this blog post to describe my USB keyset interface.
Along the way, however, I got sidetracked by the history of The Mother of All Demos and how it obtained that name.
It turns out that Engelbart’s demo isn’t the first demo to be called “The Mother of All Demos”.

Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos

Engelbart’s work has its roots in
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 visionary essay, “As We May Think.”
Bush envisioned thinking machines, along with the “memex”, a compact machine holding a library of collective knowledge with hypertext-style links: “The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox.”
The memex could search out information based on associative search, building up a hypertext-like trail of connections.

In the early 1960s, Engelbart was inspired by Bush’s essay and set out
to develop means to augment human intellect: “increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.”3
Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI), where
he and his team created a system called NLS (oN-Line System).

Engelbart editing a hierarchical shopping list.

In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated NLS to a crowd of two thousand people
at the Fall Joint Computer Conference.
Engelbart gave the demo from the stage, wearing a crisp shirt and tie and a headset microphone.
Engelbart created hierarchical documents, such as the shopping list above, and moved around them with hyperlinks.
He demonstrated how text could be created, moved, and edited with the keyset and mouse.
Other documents included graphics, crude line drawing by today’s standards but cutting-edge for the time.
The computer’s output was projected onto a giant screen, along with video of Engelbart.

Engelbart using the keyset to edit text. Note that the display doesn’t support lowercase text; instead, uppercase is indicated by a line above the character. Adapted from The Mother of All Demos.

Engelbart sat at a specially-designed Herman Miller desk6 that held the
keyset, keyboard, and mouse, shown above.
While Engelbart was on stage in San Francisco,
the SDS 9404 computer that ran the NLS software was 30 miles to the south in Menlo Park.5

To the modern eye, the demo resembles a PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, as
Engelbart collaborated with
Jeff Rulifson and Bill Paxton, miles away in Menlo Park.
(Just like a modern Zoom call, the remote connection started with “We’re not hearing you. How about now?”)
Jeff Rulifson browsed the NLS code, jumping between code files with hyperlinks and expanding subroutines by clicking on them.
NLS was written in custom high-level languages, which they developed
with a “compiler compiler” called TREE-META.
The NLS system held interactive documentation as well as tracking bugs and changes.
Bill Paxton interactively drew a diagram and then demonstrated how NLS could be used as a database, retrieving information by searching on keywords.
(Although Engelbart was stressed by the live demo, Paxton told me that he was “too young and inexperienced to be concerned.”)

Bill Paxton, in Menlo Park, communicating with the conference in San Francisco.

Bill English, an electrical engineer, not only built the first mouse for Engelbart but was also the hardware mastermind behind the demo.
In San Francisco, the screen images were projected on a 20-foot screen by a Volkswagen-sized
Eiodophor projector, bouncing light off a modulated oil film.
Numerous cameras, video switchers and mixers created the video image.
Two leased microwave links and half a dozen antennas connected SRI in Menlo Park to the demo in San Francisco.
High-speed modems send the mouse, keyset, and keyboard signals from the demo back to SRI.
Bill English spent months assembling the hardware and network for the demo and then managed the demo behind the scenes, assisted by a team of about 17 people.

Another participant was the famed counterculturist Stewart Brand, known for the Whole Earth Catalog
and the WELL, one of the oldest online virtual communities.
Brand advised Engelbart on the presentation, as well as running a camera. He’d often point the camera at a monitor to generate swirling psychedelic
feedback patterns, reminiscent of the LSD that he and Engelbart had experimented with.

The demo received press attention such as
a San Francisco Chronicle article titled “Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s Computer”.
It st