The 1968 “Mother of All Demos” by Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was so important because it fundamentally transformed how people thought about computers and their purpose. Before this demonstration, computers were mainly seen as machines for computation — tools used by experts to perform calculations or manage data. Engelbart’s demo, however, showcased the computer as a medium for human communication and collaboration. It introduced revolutionary ideas like the mouse, hypertext links, real-time text editing, video conferencing, and collaborative document sharing — all technologies that later became central to personal computing and the Internet age.
Beyond the impressive technologies, the demo’s real importance lay in its vision of computing as a tool to augment human intellect. Engelbart showed that computers could help people work together to solve complex problems, marking a shift from “computation” to “communication.” As Terry Winograd later argued, this shift represented a broader trajectory from “machinery” to “habitat,” where computers became integral to how humans live, communicate, and interact with information. The demo’s influence can be seen in the birth of interaction design and the modern user interface — fields focused not just on how machines work, but on how humans experience and inhabit digital spaces.
Engelbart’s vision ultimately led to a new professional and intellectual field centered on human experience — interaction design. Winograd argues that as computing moved beyond technical efficiency toward shaping how people live and communicate in digital spaces, a new kind of designer was needed — one who could bridge technology and human concerns. Like architects designing spaces for people to inhabit, interaction designers create environments where users think, work, and connect through software. This field draws from psychology, graphic design, communication, and computer science, but stands apart from them because it focuses on how people interact, not just on how systems function.