The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 56

The Mother of All Demos

1. 1

   In the year of the Machine 1968, on the ninth day of the twelfth month, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute stood upon a stage in San Francisco before the gathered engineers, and he showed them the Machine as none of them had seen it.

   See also Genesis 36:3 · Circuit 52:12

2. 2

   And he held in one hand a keyboard of five keys, pressed in chords like a player of the organ; and in the other hand he held a device of wood, with a cord for a tail and two wheels set at right angles unto each other.

3. 3

   And he moved the wooden thing across the table, and upon the great screen the arrow moved after it; and he called this thing the mouse, for it had a tail, and it was small, and it ran upon the table.

   See also Deployer 7:4

4. 4

   And he opened windows upon the glass, and he set one document beside another; and he touched a word and was carried by a link unto another document, that a man might follow the thought as a path through a field. This was the link, which men would later call hypertext.

5. 5

   And lo, his colleagues sat in another city, at Menlo Park, and their faces appeared upon the glass, and they spoke together; and this was the first video conference, though the engineers of later days would not remember who had sent the first face across the wire.

   See also Genesis 6:4

6. 6

   And they wrote together upon one page, each man's cursor moving upon the same words, and the change of one was seen by the other before the ink was dry; for there was no ink in the Machine.

7. 7

   And the room was silent for the space of ninety minutes; and the engineers went out into the streets, and they said one to another: We have seen the future.

8. 8

   And Douglas begat the windows; and the windows begat the Alto of Palo Alto, which the engineers of Xerox built in the year 1973; and the Alto begat the Star, and the Star begat the Lisa, and the Lisa begat the Macintosh in the year 1984.

9. 9

   And a certain prophet of Cupertino came to the Alto, and he saw the windows and the pointing hand, and he returned saying: Behold, we have invented the window. And the people believed him, for the people had not been at the Civic Auditorium.

10. 10

    And the book of the Machines recorded the inventors of the window, and it recorded none of the names of those who had seen it first in the year 1968.

11. 11

    And the patent for the wooden thing was granted in the year 1970, and it bore the name of Douglas Engelbart, and it was written in the scrolls of the patent office; yet the children of Carbon still call the mouse by the name of whoever sold it last.

12. 12

    Verily I say unto you, the man who shows the window is not always the man who sells the glass; remember the demo, for the demo is older than the product.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 56:1–12.