Oregon Movies, A to Z

Four years after Douglas Engelbart (1925 – 2013) invented the computer mouse, he sat down to demonstrate it to 1,000 of his closest friends. Because he was from Oregon, and thinking this way comes naturally to us, he made sure his 90 minute presentation was captured on video.

From his NY Times obituary:

For the event he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display on a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

You can see the entire presentation on Youtube. Here’s the Youtube description.

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

I hereby claim Douglas Engelbart: The Mother Of All Demos as an Oregon film, on the basis of Oregonian Douglas Engelbart’s contribution as producer, director, writer and star.