On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, Douglas Engelbart and a team from Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center gave a 90-minute live demonstration that introduced, in a single sitting, the computer mouse, the chord keyset, hypertext linking, windowed interfaces, real-time collaborative document editing, and video conferencing, connected live to colleagues 30 miles away at SRI’s Menlo Park lab, over a line Engelbart’s own team had built.
The work was funded by ARPA, with additional support from NASA: the same Cold War research apparatus that produced the ARPANET. There was no product to sell and no shareholders to answer to; the “customer” was continued government funding for a research program built on one sweeping thesis, that computers should augment human intellect rather than just calculate. Nearly every tech demo since has borrowed its form (one presenter, a live machine, an audience asked to see the future) without inheriting its funding model: publicly resourced research, demonstrated once, then folded into products built and owned by others.
