Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 demo at SRI is called “The Mother of All Demos” and it was pretty crazy for its time. He showed off the first computer mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, real-time text editing, and people working together online – all in one demo. That’s a lot of stuff that didn’t exist before.
I think it was important because before this, people saw computers as these huge machines that just did math calculations. Engelbart showed that computers could actually help people think better and work together. His vision was that technology should make humans smarter and more collaborative, not just do number crunching.
A lot of the stuff we use everyday now like word processing and working on documents together online basically started from this demo. It’s kind of wild that so many things we think are normal now all came from one presentation in 1968.