TechPulse 360

Forty years ago Tuesday, Doug Engelbart gave a 90-minute computer demonstration in San Francisco now called the “Mother of all Demos.”

It was there at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference that Engelbart showed off the first mouse, hypertext links, real-time editing, the use of multiple windows and early teleconferencing.

"There were obstacles of all sorts," says Robert Taylor

The exhibition helped pave the way for modern, interactive computing at a time when most computers ran punch cards and handled little outside of the batch processing of numerical records.

A major source of Engelbart’s research funding came from Robert Taylor, a government employee who held the purse strings at NASA’s advanced research and technology office and later at the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, where he gave money for the precursor of the Internet, the ARPANET.

On Tuesday, Taylor came to Stanford University to commemorate the anniversary of the fateful demo. Here are excerpts from an on-stage interview:

*Back then, “computing was believed to be for arithmetic. I wasn’t interested in numbers and neither was Doug.” To program a computer someone had to punch holes in computer cards and return the next day to see what the computer had run. “It just seemed insane.”

*Taylor was inspired after coming across a 1962 paper Engelbart had written entitled “Augmenting Human Intellect,” and the two men’s partnership was born. But the computer establishment wasn’t ready for their interactive computing.

*Taylor recalls inviting IBM to be part of APRANET and being dismissed. “Our computers already talk to one another,” he recalls being told. AT&T had no more foresight. He offered the company a free node on the network. “Packet switching won’t work,” came the company’s response. “We’re not interested.”

*“There were obstacles of all sorts,” Taylor said. “Did I feel alone? Yes.”

*After all this, is today’s research environment any different? “If you want good research to be done, you better give your researchers a lot of room,” with freedom from research milestones and progress reports, he said. That used to be the spirit at ARPA, now called DARPA. “That spirit has gradually decayed over the years,” said Taylor.