On December 9th, 1968, a gentleman by the name of Doug Engelbart dropped the mouth of 2,000 people from on stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
In a matter of 90 minutes, Doug and his team demonstrated a whole different way that computers could operate and how people could use them to increase their productivity. This presentation was the debut of the mouse, interactive computing, hypermedia, computer supported software engineering, and video teleconferencing all rolled into one, and to top it off, Doug explained the benefits of connecting these all together in a national network sometime the following year…something called ARPA, which would later become the Internet.
Doug’s work, along with Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center later in the 70s, would lay the foundation to the modern graphical user interface that would shape computing up to the present day.
If this interests you, do a Youtube search for “1968 Mother of All Demos” to watch it in its entirety!