{"id":291,"date":"2025-10-08T21:44:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T21:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/?p=291"},"modified":"2025-10-08T21:44:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T21:44:53","slug":"the-mouse-that-changed-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/2025\/10\/08\/the-mouse-that-changed-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mouse That Changed the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><p>The legendary 1968 demo by Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI \u2014 often called\u00a0<em>\u201cThe Mother of All Demos.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0That presentation really changed everything.<\/p><p>Back then, people saw computers as machines that only did math \u2014 tools for scientists to process data or run calculations. But Engelbart showed a completely different vision. For the first time, he demonstrated\u00a0<strong>the computer mouse, hypertext links, real-time editing, video conferencing, and shared screens<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 things that sounded like science fiction at the time.<\/p><p>What made this demo so important, in my opinion, is that it turned the computer from a cold calculating machine into a new space for\u00a0<strong>thinking, communicating, and creating<\/strong>. As Terry Winograd mentions in\u00a0<em>\u201cFrom Computing Machinery to Interaction Design,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0it marked a shift from seeing computers as \u201cmachinery\u201d to seeing them as a kind of \u201chabitat\u201d where humans live and collaborate.<\/p><p>Engelbart\u2019s demo helped lay the foundation for\u00a0<strong>interaction design<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 showing that technology isn\u2019t just about what computers can do, but about how people use them to connect with each other. Every time we move a cursor, click an icon, or share a document online, we\u2019re continuing what started in that room back in 1968.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The legendary 1968 demo by Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI \u2014 often called\u00a0\u201cThe Mother of All Demos.\u201d\u00a0That presentation really changed everything. Back then, people saw computers as machines that only did math \u2014 tools for scientists to process data or run calculations. But Engelbart showed a completely different vision. For the first time, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mid-century-innovations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interactiondesignhistory.com\/Fall2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}