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How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos

wired.com · 3,340 words · saved by 1 readers

In this excerpt from Valley of Genius, author Adam Fisher sketches how Doug Engelbart came up with many of the ideas of modern computing.

Save this story Save this story Doug Engelbart was the first to actually build a computer that might seem familiar to us, today. He came to Silicon Valley after a stint in the Navy as a radar technician during World War II. Engelbart was, in his own estimation, a “naïve drifter,” but something about the Valley inspired him to think big. Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration. Computers, he reasoned, should have keyboards and screens instead of punch cards and printouts. They should augment rather than replace the hu

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