The origins of the Mac

How the mother of all demos led to the computer that changed everything

After looking where 2019 might take Apple last issue, this time we wind back the clock to discover how one demo led to the birth of Apple’s main machine.

Exactly 50 years ago, without any fanfare, unnoticed by most, unrecognized even by many who were right there in the room, the future arrived. It was December 9 1968, a Monday. At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Douglas C Engelbart gave a presentation of a revolutionary approach to computing, which demonstrated for the first time a whole complex of concepts fundamental to computing as we know it today — a windowed interface with which you interact using a keyboard and mouse, direct on–screen text editing, copy and paste, and much more.

Bear in mind that at the time, a computer filled a room and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the usual way to interact with it was to have a technician feed it punch cards or load spools of paper tape. Engelbart’s demo was run off a room–sized, time–sharing computer 30 miles