Douglas Engelbart gives ‘the mother of all demos’

Douglas Engelbart, who earned two graduate degrees in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, outlines the future of the information age in a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration.

After serving as a radar technician in World War II, followed by a brief stint at Ames Research Center, Engelbart came to Berkeley Engineering. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1953 and, two years later, a Ph.D., also in EE. In 1964, Engelbart developed an early prototype of a computer mouse using a block of pine. In 1968, in a now famous presentation called “the mother of all demos,” Engelbart outlined the future of the information age and showed the audience his ideas about easily accessible graphic computer interfaces (making use of his mouse), networking and collaborative concepts such as email and shared documents.

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