01 1968
1968
The Mother of All Demos
Douglas Engelbart · SRI / ARPA
Douglas Engelbart's 1968 “Mother of All Demos” showcased revolutionary computing concepts including the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, collaborative real-time editing, and windowed interfaces, decades before they became mainstream. It fundamentally reshaped the vision of personal computing from number-crunching machines into interactive tools for augmenting human intellect.
More on this source →
02 1984
1984
Macintosh introduction
Apple · Flint Center, Cupertino
At Apple’s 1984 shareholders meeting, Steve Jobs let the Macintosh introduce itself: “Hello, I am Macintosh.” He then played Ridley Scott’s Orwellian “1984” ad and cast IBM as Big Brother threatening computing’s future. The demo doubled as a declaration of war on an incumbent, establishing the product launch as theatre: a machine given a voice, and a market framed as a fight for freedom.
More on this source →
03 1995
1995
Windows 95 launch
Microsoft · Redmond campus, WA
Bill Gates unveiled Windows 95 on Microsoft’s Redmond campus with Jay Leno as co-host, live game demos, and a crowd of thousands watching the new Start button and taskbar, pitched as finally answering a new user’s most basic question: where do I begin? The event, part product launch and part carnival, set the template for treating a piece of software as a mass cultural event.
More on this source →
04 2007
2007
iPhone introduction
Apple · Moscone Center, San Francisco
Steve Jobs opened his Macworld keynote by promising three new products (a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator) before revealing they were one device: “an iPhone.” The reveal introduced multi-touch to a mass audience and framed a single proprietary handset as history repeating the leaps of the Mac and the iPod.
More on this source →
05 2017
2017
Google Lens introduction
Google · Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View
At Google I/O, Sundar Pichai showed a phone camera identifying a flower and reading the Wi-Fi password off a router sticker to connect automatically: computer vision framed as the camera “understanding” what it sees rather than merely capturing it. The demo cast the search engine as something that could act in the physical world on your behalf, not just answer questions about it.
More on this source →
06 2019
2019
Cybertruck unveiling
Tesla · Tesla Design Studio, Hawthorne, CA
Elon Musk’s reveal of the Cybertruck’s “armor glass” turned into an unplanned demonstration when a thrown steel ball cracked both the driver’s and rear windows live on stage. Tesla later reported 200,000 pre-orders in the days that followed regardless: a reminder that a demo’s persuasive force can survive, or even be sharpened by, its own failure.
More on this source →
07 2024
2024
Introducing GPT-4o
OpenAI · San Francisco
OpenAI’s livestreamed “Spring Update” had GPT-4o talk a researcher through a handwritten equation, translate live between English and Italian, and read emotion from a face: voice and vision fused into one continuous conversation, fast enough to feel less like querying a machine and more like talking to a person. The demo became the reference point for what an AI voice assistant was now expected to do.
More on this source →
08 2025
2025
Meta Connect keynote
Meta · Meta headquarters, Menlo Park, CA
Mark Zuckerberg’s live demo of Meta’s Ray-Ban Display AI glasses failed twice on stage: a cooking assistant that jumped ahead of its own instructions, and a video call that wouldn’t connect after four tries. The keynote is the same genre run in reverse: a promise of frictionless AI undone, live, by the friction it promised to remove.
More on this source →