Life as We Know It Turns 50
The 1968 ‘Mother of All Demos’ showed the world a vision for modern computing.
San Francisco in 1968 was littered with flower children, free love and dreams of utopia encapsulated in Timothy Leary’s exhortation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” How wrong that was! But out of this purple haze rose that year’s Joint Computer Conference, where an assembly of geniuses wearing white short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors convened 50 years ago this week. The event shined a guiding light on the path to personal computing and set the modern world in motion.
On Dec. 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research...