The slow decay of memory… collective? My own? Two days ago, December 9 marked the 55th year since an epic event everyone should revel in, the 1968 Mother of All Demos (I am citing it as MoAD) by Doug Engelbart and his team from SGI.
I think I saw one mention in my Mastodon feed and spotted maybe an NPR story in news. Seems to have slipped by.
Among a number of good things that happened while I worked for the New Media Consortium was attending a board meeting in 2006 where Doug Engelbart shared his ideas on networking and augmented intelligence in organizations. One of my favorite images was compositing a photo of him speaking at that meeting with his image from the 1968 MoAD, almost like a chorus of old fashioned human intelligence.
I was fortunate enough to be at the 40th anniversary of MoAD in 2008 where Doug was present and I got to witness the conversations of the greats, those who were there, living history.
Not to mention having a second row Behind Doug view of the talk by Alan Kay
My connections with Engelbart’s daugther Christina, led to some bits of media work for the Doug Engelbart Institute’s web site, and also doing the WordPress site for the MoAD’s 50th bash in 2018 — I made that animated GIF with changing screen images inside the San Francisco Civic Auditorium
I have to acknowledge getting to appreciate the impact of Engelbart’s vision was always my good friend and colleague Gardner Campbell, who always brought the works of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart to his teaching, seminars, presentations.
I found a Gardner Writes blog reference to them both going back to 2004, and so many projects together since, like the Connected Course (flashback!) Thought Vectors in Concept Space and later when I helped with Gardner’s Engelbart Framework Annotation Project an open effort of annotating Engelbart’s seminal work Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.
You can see (well only if you are logged into the dead platform formerly known as Twitter) the day Twitter nuked it’s API and my interest in the platform from the date of the last tweet from a bot I created to share Englebart’s words @DEngelbot.
Anyhow, I was not the best myself at remembering December 9 as Mother of All Demos Day. But at least I got it two days later.
After all, if you are going to do a demo, why not go for the Mother of All.
Featured Image: Mine! Cut on the Dotted Lines (1) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
