I'm in the first class of Social Machines: Online Learning Communities, going over a history of the modern computer and internet. One of the most fascinating characters is a guy named Doug Engelbart, "father of the personal computer."
In a 6-year period in the 60's, Doug and his team developed the mouse, hypertext, the client-server architecture, to a large extent the internet and a slew of other thing. What is amazing is that the bulk of this research was presented in one place, to 1000 people, on Dec 9, 1968. This was the equivalent of Woodstock for computer users. From Wikipedia:
At the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team, demonstrated the workings of the NLS (which stood for oNLine System) to the 1,000 computer professionals in attendance... The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext.
Keeping in mind that nobody had seen a personal computer before, this is a pretty amazing demonstration. Thanks to the technologies that Doug and his team envisioned, the video is available below :)
Note: In the cllip, Jeff Rollifson appears, who ends up leading the development of the Mac at Apple.
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