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https://www.righto.com/2025/03/mother-of-all-demos-usb-keyset-interface.html>
'In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers
could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an intellectual
worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was
alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how
much value could you derive from that?" Engelbart developed many features of
modern computing that we now take for granted: the mouse, hypertext, shared
documents, windows, and a graphical user interface. At the 1968 Joint Computer
Conference, Engelbart demonstrated these innovations in a groundbreaking
presentation, now known as "The Mother of All Demos."
Engelbart's demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike
his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on. The 5-finger keyset lets
you type without moving your hand, entering characters by pressing multiple
keys simultaneously as a chord. Christina Englebart, his daughter, loaned one
of Engelbart's keysets to me. I constructed an interface to connect the keyset
to USB, so that it can be used with a modern computer. The video below shows me
typing with the keyset, using the mouse buttons to select upper case and
special characters.
I wrote this blog post to describe my USB keyset interface. Along the way,
however, I got sidetracked by the history of The Mother of All Demos and how it
obtained that name. It turns out that Engelbart's demo isn't the first demo to
be called "The Mother of All Demos".'
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
