Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 4: Digital Era (1960s)

1968

Douglas Engelbart Gives The Mother of all Demos

Invention · North America · Top Moment

Original black-and-white session poster announcing Engelbart’s December 9 demonstration of an interactive computer display system.
Original session announcement for Douglas Engelbart’s “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect,” December 9, 1968—the Mother of All Demos. 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference / Stanford Research Institute. Session poster preserved by the Doug Engelbart Institute; designer and portrait photographer not identified. Image source.

This monumental demonstration showed how computers could “amplify human capabilities,” paving the way for modern user interface and experience, changing the way computers were used to make art forever. Engelbart’s presentation included demos of the mouse, word processing, the first graphical user interface (UGI), hypertext, video conferencing, real-time collaboration, and other modern computing concepts. He gave the demo at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society’s Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Douglas Engelbart

Movements

Human-Computer Interaction, Technology and Art, digital art

Filed under

Ideas
collaboration, tools
Technologies
computer mouse, graphical user interface (GUI), hypertext, Processing, video conferencing, word processing
People
Douglas Engelbart
Works
The Mother of All Demos
Organisations
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fall Joint Computer Conference, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Places
San Francisco

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