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50 Years On, We're Living the Reality First Shown At the 'Mother of All Demos' (arstechnica.com)
Thelasko quotes a report from Ars Technica: A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart -- then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley -- gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos." On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others. Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible -- responsive -- to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?" By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible -- responsive -- to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?" By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
His crew went to Xerox Parc. The actual realization of desktop computing for the masses was carried out by apple. Englebart was living in the future for a long time before we finally had a macintosh on our own desktop.
I would argue that it's Microsoft that brought desktop computing to the masses. Some would argue that there would have been no Windows without the Mac, but that would be ignoring that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs visited Xerox Parc and that both understood the importance of what they had seen. It's true that Apple had a product to the market first, but Microsoft Windows became the defacto business OS, reaching way more people than Apple.
Microsoft did drive down the price but I think your timeline is off. Even at the stage of windows 2, the microsoft version was a joke. It was barely usable, it was barely a graphical interface, but mostly was character generated pseudographics. And Win 2 wasn't even available till 1988. It Wasn't until windows 3 that they started looking a bit more like what people think of as windowed graphics, and even then the fonts were pretty ugly, and you sort had to switch modes to see what your document would look like (ala WordPerfect, the competitor to Word). IN contrast the mac was fully graphical and had gorgeous fonts from day 1, it didn't have a DOS mode sticking out from behind a cheap false front. Window 3 came out in 1990, or 6 years after the 1984 Apple Debut of Lisa/Mac.
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