The Mother of All Demo by Douglas Engelbart
The Mother of All Demo by Douglas Engelbart

Enactment organised by Disorderly Interfaces.

Enactment organised by Disorderly Interfaces.

Witness a demonstration of experimental computer technologies featuring the very first introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and collaborative real-time text editing to augment the human intellect as never before.

Conceived by Douglas Engelbart and developed by him and colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the groundbreaking computer framework known as oN-Line System (NLS), jointly funded by ARPA and the Air Force, evolved throughout the decade. In what became known as "The Mother of All Demos"—because it demonstrated the revolutionary features of NLS as well as never-before-seen video presentation technologies—Engelbart unveiled NLS in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, to a large audience at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. Engelbart's terminal was linked to a large-format video projection system loaned by the NASA Ames Research Center and via telephone lines to a SDS 940 computer (designed specifically for time-sharing among multiple users) 30 miles away in Menlo Park, California, at the Augmentation Research Center, which Engelbart founded at SRI. On a 22-foot-high screen with video insets, the audience could see Engelbart manipulate the mouse and watch as members of his team in Menlo Park joined in the presentation. NLS opened pathways toward today’s astounding range of information technologies.

This talk will be followed by a reception to toast to the new academic year.

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When and where?

October 13th, 2021. Doors open at 19h30, talk starts at 20h. Estimated duration: 45 minutes, followed by a reception.

Grote Aula at Campus Vesalius, Vesaliusstraat 13, 3000 Leuven or

Department of Computer Science, Celestijnenlaan 200 A, 3001 LEUVEN

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Register

Attending is free but we ask that you register here! that way we can also foresee the right number of drinks and fingerfood. Note that there is a no-show fee of 15 EUR, meaning that if you register but do not show up, you will be requested to pay. In case you cannot come due to external circumstances, you may pass on your 'registration’ to someone else, to take your place.

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This talk is a reenactment organised by

DisorderlyInterfaces⁠

as part of larger series of reenactments of seminal talks in the history of computer-human interaction.

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For more information about our other upcoming events, and past reenactments, please visit

Enactments in the History of Computer-Human Interaction.⁠

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This series are supported by the HCI research unit of department Computer Science, KU Leuven, by LUCA School of Arts, and by the eMedia research lab.

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The Mother of All Demo by Douglas EngelbartThe Mother of All Demo by Douglas Engelbart

When and where?

Register

The Mother of All Demo by Douglas Engelbart
The Mother of All Demo by Douglas Engelbart