In December 1968, engineer and inventor Douglas C. Engelbart and a team of more than a dozen engineers and staff from the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC) gave a demonstration at San Francisco’s Civic Center Auditorium to show off what they called the oN-Line System (NLS). The demo, which lasted for about an hour and a half, became known as “The Mother of All Demos” because for many of the 1,000 computer technology professionals in the audience, it was the first time they saw personal computers used interactively, rather than crunching numbers via punch cards.

Engelbart began his work two decades earlier while he was stationed in the Philippines as a Navy radar technician during WWII. There, he read an essay by Vannevar Bush called “As We May Think,” which proposed furthering human intellect and memory through the use of a hypothetical machine called the Memex. After the war, Engelbart joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where he published a 1962 paper called “Augmenting the Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The following year, Engelbart’s research was funded by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA, now known widely as DARPA) as well as NASA.

The research was first sponsored by J.C.R. Licklider, and then by Robert Taylor, who is widely credited with building an early version of a networked system, called the ARPAnet, which helped researchers at various labs share their work. (Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at SRI was the second host on the ARPAnet.)

To give an idea of the scope of the demo, Engelbart demonstrated an early look at word processing, windowing, hypertext, and dynamic file linking, as well as using graphics in a computer program. It was also the first time many of the attendees had seen a mouse, although work on the mouse began in 1963.

Furthermore, the demo made use of an early form of videoconferencing. The researchers projected video output from the computer Engelbart manipulated, and cut that with video output from a feed coming from the research center in Menlo Park where several members of the team were based that night. The showrunner of it all was William “Bill" English, who, along with Engelbart, is also widely credited with developing the modern mouse.

When the demo was over, the AHIRC team received a standing ovation. (You can read more about Engelbart’s contributions to the modern GUI here.)

A modern-day take

At Stanford University's campus last week, Ars attended a two-night-only showing of “The Demo,” an experimental opera meant to pay homage to "The Mother of All Demos.”

Video of “The Mother of All Demos" was shown on a large screen in the center of the stage while co-creator, composer, actor, and vocalist Mikel Rouse played Engelbart sitting at a desk to one side of the stage. On the other side of the stage, co-creator and composer Ben Neill played Bill English in a more modern setting, complete with a computer screen running a timer. Neill played an instrument that the show’s program notes told us was a “hybrid electroacoustical ‘mutantrumpet’ which [Neill] designed in collaboration with Robert Moog.”

Behind the video feed of the demo, a group dressed as office workers in a dramatically-lit office provided back-up vocals.

The result was a reenactment of this seminal piece of computer history in an abstract, sound-drenched, 90-minute performance.

At the beginning of the original demo, Engelbart demonstrates word processing by he copying the word “word” over and over again. This became a theme throughout the modern-day "Demo", with the actors on stage singing “word” over and over.

The composers wanted to highlight the humanity in Engelbart’s work on machines and they did so at all the predictable parts of the original "Demo." When 1968 Engelbart is making his shopping list and accidentally comes up with the words “skinless banana” as he's manipulating words in his demonstration, the actors sang the words and flashed a banana on the screen. When Engelbart tells his 1968 audience that the AHIRC is “pursuing this monstrous goal, monstrously difficult,” the opera gave those words an orchestral magnificence.

As the video of "The Mother of All Demos” progressed, the mutantrumpet played a larger part, becoming increasingly frenetic as it continued. This was my favorite part of the performance—though I felt Rouse’s manic typing on a prop-version of Engelbart’s five-key “chording keyboard” took a literal reenactment a little too far, the trumpet performance conveyed a wildness that mirrored the pace of history after “The Mother of All Demos” was over—crazy, breakneck, and unpredictable.

In a discussion after the performance, Neill and Rouse said that their goal had been “to depict Engelbart dreaming forward and backward,” as well as to pay homage to Engelbart, who died in 2013.

Retelling history to the people who lived it

Surprisingly, many of the attendees that night were people who had actually worked with Engelbart, either at SRI or on subsequent projects in the '70s and '80s. To my surprise, it seemed that many of those around me felt that Neill and Rouse had taken too many liberties with “The Mother of All Demos.”

An older man seated behind me tapped me on the shoulder at intermission: ”Are you getting any of this?” he asked.

I offered my best guess at the time: ”I think it’s supposed to be an abstract meditation on the meaning of The Demo?”

”Well I worked with Doug and I don’t understand any of it,” he laughed. “And it’s very loud for a meditation.”

In a Q&A session with the creators afterward, one man said that as a technologist, he was disappointed that the artists hadn’t included more technical details. “It’s supposed to have a non-traditional, non-narrative structure,” Rouse offered, adding that “a lot of young developers today look to code as this very elegant thing,” almost like poetry, to the point where Stanford students hold “code poetry slams” to bring art to their work.

Another woman stood up during the Q&A session and told the artists, “I wish there was more about the social vision for computing—I worked with him for a long time and Doug was always thinking ‘how can we collectively collaborate,’ like a sort of rock band.” Neill countered that his team wanted to capture the essence of the demo first: “it’s more improvised. When [Engelbart] is doing the original demo he’s so relaxed, he’s so cool.”

While the members of the audience who had actually been at The Mother of All Demos were left wanting more, such a performance might have appealed to a younger audience, or a group of people who’d never heard of “The Mother of All Demos” before. The performance never really expanded beyond the confines of that single event, so re-creating a piece of performance art from 1968 with a much more abstract performance in 2015 understandably felt redundant to an audience that was captured by the first show.

Inventing the mouse

After the performance, the artists mentioned that Bill English and his wife, Roberta English, née Carillon, who had also worked with the AHIRC team, were in the audience. Ars contacted Bill to talk about his contributions to "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968.

”When I first joined Engelbart it was a very small operation," English said. "We had a contract to evaluate pointing devices."

While the mouse in the 1968 demonstration had three buttons, the original prototype had just one button. In fact, English told us, the SRI team started out looking at a variety of pointing devices, including a light pen and a joystick.

The most basic device that informed English's early research was the planimeter, he said, which was developed in the 1800s as a way to determine the area of a flat surface. At first, “it was a matter of simply putting a planimeter in a box,” English said. The team then combined that with a potentiometer.

English recounted that the prototype was built in the SRI machine shop, and the distance the mouse travelled became a question of how big a wheel he wanted to put into the mouse prototype, which would define how far it would move. He said he asked himself, "how far am I willing to move my hand?” which became the basis for the size of the tracking wheel in the mouse.

English is also credited for being the person in charge of the logistics that made the 1968 demo as impressive as it was. By showing the audience not only Engelbart’s actions on the computer he manipulated, but also live feeds from SRI in Menlo Park, the team gave many in the audience their first look at video conferencing.

English told Ars that part of the reason it all worked so well was due to the enthusiasm of a single PacBell employee. “It was a problem of getting a video signal from Menlo Park to the Civic Center in San Francisco,” English said. "I talked to someone at PacBell. I said ‘Now can we get a video signal from SRI to San Francisco's Civic Center?’”

"I wish I knew the guy's name, cause he deserves a lot of credit,” English continued, saying that the employee was immediately excited about the technical feat that English was proposing.

Before the night of the demo, the PacBell employee went up to Skyline Drive, a windy road skirting some of the bigger hills south of San Francisco, and scoped out a good spot with line of sight to both locations. Eventually, the employee "sent up two trucks, one of them picking up signal from Menlo Park and then in turn transmitting it to the auditorium,” English said.

The rest is art and history.