• Early 1960s: Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence. He developed many features of modern computing like the mouse, hypertext, shared documents, windows, and a graphical user interface at the Stanford Research Institute.
• 1968 Joint Computer Conference: Engelbart demonstrated these innovations in a groundbreaking presentation called "The Mother of All Demos". He sat at a specially-designed Herman Miller desk with the keyset, keyboard, and mouse. He created hierarchical documents and moved around them with hyperlinks. The computer's output was projected onto a giant screen. Jeff Rulifson browsed the NLS code, Bill Paxton interactively drew a diagram and demonstrated using NLS as a database. Bill English built the first mouse and managed the demo behind the scenes. The demo received some press attention but was ignored for decades.
• After 1968: Engelbart continued his work at SRI for almost a decade but was sidelined when SRI sold the Augmentation Research Center to Tymshare. Bill English and some other SRI researchers migrated to Xerox PARC and worked on the Xerox Alto computer which incorporated many ideas from the Augmentation Research Center. Steve Jobs recognized the importance of interactivity, the graphical user interface, and the mouse when he visited Xerox PARC. In 1984, McDonnell Douglas acquired Tymshare and Engelbart's software was renamed Augment. In 1987, McDonnell Douglas released MiniBASE for the IBM PC but it had little impact. Engelbart left McDonnell Douglas in 1988 and formed the Bootstrap Institute.
• The Name "The Mother of All Demos": The name has its roots in the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein's "the mother of all battles" phrase caught media attention. The phrase became a 1990s equivalent of a meme and was applied to various things. In 1991, Andy Grove gave a keynote speech at Comdex 1991 and called it "The Mother of All Demos". In 1994, Steven Levy's book mentioned Engelbart's 1968 demo as "the mother of all demos". By the end of the century, multiple publications echoed the phrase.
• Interfacing the keyset to USB: The keyset consists of five microswitches wired to a DB-25 connector. A Teensy 3.6 microcontroller board is used for the interface. Reading the keyset and sending characters over USB has some complications like dealing with button bouncing and combining keyset with mouse buttons. The code uses the Keyboard and USBHost_t36 libraries.
• Conclusions: Engelbart claimed learning a keyset wasn't difficult but the author found it difficult to use physically. If anyone wants to connect a keyset via USB, the author's code is on github. Thanks to Christina Engelbart and Bill Paxton.
• Footnotes and References: Engelbart's use of the mouse was based on research. There are information sheets for the keyset specifying character encodings and viewspecs. Engelbart used an SDS 940 computer. The Mother of All Demos is on YouTube. The desk was designed by Herman Miller. Engelbart's demo was ignored for many years but started getting attention in the 1980s. Levy wrote about Engelbart a decade earlier. SRI researchers moved to Xerox. Tymshare's Augment system is discussed. The "mother of all battles" phrase has a background. At the Mobile '92 conference, there were different views on personal communicators. References to Intel's "Mother of all demos" are mentioned. Andy van Dam's claim about the phrase is discussed. A 3D-printed chording keyset project is also mentioned.