That essay, “As We May Think,” speculated on a “future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.” It was this essay that stuck with a young Engelbart—then a Navy technician stationed in the Philippines—for more than two decades.
By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the “oN-Line System,” or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
Five years later, in 1973, Xerox debuted the Alto, considered to be the first modern personal computer. That, in turn served as the inspiration for both the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, and the rest, clearly, is history.
“Doug and [J.C.R. Licklider] were two of our farthest seeing visionaries,” Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol, told Ars in July 2013.
“Doug’s NLS was as close to Vannever Bush‘s vision of Memex as you could get in the 1960s. He had a keen sense of the way in which computers could augment human capacity to think. Much of what transpired at Xerox PARC owes its origins to Doug and the people who created NLS with him. The [Web] is a manifestation of some of what he imagined or hoped although his aspirations exceeded even that in terms of human and computer partnerships.”
In 2015, Stanford University hosted “The Demo,” a work of musical theater inspired by this occasion.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is hosting a few events related to the anniversary—one is scheduled for later in the week, on December 12.