Butler Lampson: (professor of computer science, University of California Berkeley) The SDS 940 [used for the demo] was a computer system that we developed in a research project at Berkeley, and then we coaxed SDS into actually making it into a product. Engelbart built the NLS on the 940.

Taylor: Doug and his group were able to take off-the-shelf computer hardware and transform what you could do with it through software. Software is much more difficult for people to understand than hardware. Hardware, you can pick it up and touch it and feel it and see what it looks like and so on. Software is more mysterious. It’s true that Doug’s group did some hardware innovation, but their software innovation was truly remarkable.

"We had to make our own computer display. You couldn’t buy them. I think it cost us $90,000 in 1963 money." Doug Engelbart

Bill Paxton: (colleague at the Augmentation Research Center, who participated in the demo) Remember—put yourself back. This was a group, an entire group, sharing a computer that is roughly as powerful . . . If you measure computing power in iPhones, it was a milli-iPhone. It was one one-thousandth of an iPhone that this group was using for 10 people. It was nuts! These guys did absolute miracles.

Don Andrews: (another colleague at the Augmentation Research Center) We knew from the onset, based on Doug’s vision, what we were trying to do. We were looking for ways of rapidly prototyping new user interfaces, and so building a framework, an infrastructure, that we could go into and build something on top of, over and over, very quickly. We knew that things were going to change very quickly, and essentially we were bootstrapping ourselves.

Alan Kay: (pioneer in graphical-user interfaces) In programming there is a widespread theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools. This is true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down that rat hole. On the other hand, if you can build your own tools then you absolutely should, because the leverage that can be obtained can be incredible.

Paxton: Being immersed in the group where everybody was using the same tools and using them on a day-to-day basis, and where the people who were developing the tools were sitting next to the people who were using the tools—that was a really tight loop that led to very rapid progress.

Engelbart: By 1968 I was beginning to feel that we could show a lot of dramatic things. I had this adventurous sense of Well, let’s try it then, which fairly often ended in disaster.

Taylor: In those days there were always, at these computer conferences, panel discussions attacking the idea of interactive computing. The reasons were multitudinous. They’d say, “Well, it’s too expensive. Computer time is worth more than human time. It will never work. It’s a pipe dream.” So, the great majority of the public, including the computing establishment, were not only ignorant and would be opposed to what Doug was trying to do, they were also opposed to the whole idea of interactive computing.

Engelbart: Anyway, I just wanted to try it out. I found out that the American Federation of Information Processing conference was going to be in San Francisco, so it was something we could do. I made an appeal to the people who were organizing the program. It was fortunately quite a ways ahead. The conference would be in December and I started preparing for it sometime in March, or maybe earlier, which was a good thing because, boy, they were very hesitant about us.

"By 1968 I was beginning to feel that we could show a lot of dramatic things. I had this adventurous sense of Well, let’s try it then, which fairly often ended in disaster." Doug Engelbart

Taylor: Even within that community of people who were doing work on interactive computing, there was probably a pecking order of some sort. There always is. Doug’s group, at that time, before this demo, was probably at the bottom of that pecking order.

Paxton: At the time 90 percent of the people thought he was a crackpot, that this “interactive” idea was a waste of time, and that this wasn’t really going anywhere, and that the really good stuff was artificial intelligence . . . There were a few people like Bob Taylor who picked up on the idea. And it eventually fed out into Xerox PARC and then Apple to take over the world. But, at the time, Doug was a voice crying into the wilderness.