Tuesday, December 9 will mark forty years since Silicon Valley legend Doug Engelbart captivated a crowd at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with a technology demonstration that was about as cutting edge as it gets.
“If you used a mouse to click to this article, you have Doug Engelbart to thank for it” is how I began an article [covering](http://www.pcworld.com/article/8985/the_unfinished_revolution.html) the 30th anniversary. How true. But it wasn’t just the mouse. Engelbart’s 90-minute presentation back in 1968 is considered the first public demo of personal and interactive computing.
[A video ](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097&q=engelbart)of the event shows Engelbart using a computer mouse (quite amazing when you consider most people didn’t see a mouse used as a navigation device till the debut of Apple’s Macintosh in 1984), and controlling a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, and shared-screen teleconferencing.
The commemorative event at Stanford on December 9 costs $25 general admission or $10 for students. [The agenda](http://www.sri.com/engelbart-event.html) includes talks by some of the participants in the 1968 demo, including Engelbart and [Alan Kay](http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/GASCH.KAY.HTML). Among his other accomplishments, Kay basically pioneered the concept of mobile computing with his idea of a ‘[Dynabook](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook).’
This should be one of the hotter tickets in Silicon Valley.