Innovation Pipeline

Looking back on the historic computer collaboration demonstration in 1968, it was as if a time traveler from the future had returned to San Francisco to share a glimpse of the future. There were other major technology milestones achieved that year with the first man walking on the moon.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had turned the United States upside down. Symbolic draft card burnings, riots, civil rights marches and the new music of rock-n-roll stirred the younger generation.

In a quiet, academic setting of computer scientists, another revolution was about to get underway. And it was spurred by one of the most stunning demonstrations of innovative technology anyone had ever seen.

The computer principles were completely new and revolutionary. Like sharing text through a teleconferencing session, the use of hypertext linking, real-time editing, and the display of multiple windows all helped drive home the idea of the computer becoming an extension of human communication and a vital resource for the augmentation of human intellect. All of which was demonstrated that day with a measly 20 kilobits per second of network bandwidth. By comparison, DSL today delivers 50 megabits per second, which is 2,560 faster. Also at the time no one talked about killer apps because they’re weren’t any.

It all happened that day in a span of 90 minutes at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9. Forty years later, the photos on the auditorium’s screen revealed a different time of long hair, plastic rim glasses, beards and the young music of hope and love played by the Beatles and Motown performers.

Not too many people were thinking about computers providing a liberation of the imagination, but rather an enemy, especially when college demonstrators were chanting the ”don’t bend fold or mutilate” referring to mainframes punch cards and government tracking of individuals via their social security numbers for draft calls.

“The demo was a big punctuation mark in what we were doing,” said Andries Van Dam, professor of computer science at Brown University and who witnessed the ground breaking demonstration.

Looking back 40 years later, the engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs what was particularly interesting about the commentary from his colleagues was much of the vision of Engelbart was still unrealized. “The vision has not really been realized…today we have a collection of tools that don’t interoperate,” said Mr. Van Dam.

Lots of new innovation has been spawned in the labs at SRI since that memorable demonstration, before the dawn of personal computing. And some of that guiding vision of Engelbart is alive and well in many of the latest innovations coming from the labs of SRI. By Lee Bruno