I’m going a bit off topic with this post, but I think it’s important to take a moment and be thankful for a few under-appreciated geniuses (genii?) without whom we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing today.

Back in December of 1968, when the only thought running through my 5-year old brain was wondering what Santa would bring me for Christmas, Douglas C. Engelbart was at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, introducing a group of about 1,000 scientists to a chunky 3-button box with a wire and a prototype network environment called NLS (oN-Line System).  Not only was this the public debut of the computer mouse, but the first glimpse of many other innovations we now take for granted — including hypertext, cut-copy-paste, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaborative networking and videoconferencing.

What intrigues me most is that Mr. Engelbart and his team began work on this technology in 1962, when The Beatles were still a relatively obscure band playing seedy clubs in Hamburg, Germany. That same year, J.C.R. Licklider wrote a series of memos in which he described his “Galactic Network” concept (later known as ARPANET, which in turn begat the Internet). Little did the soon-to-be Fab Four or anyone else know at the time, but Licklider, Engelbart and their like-minded colleagues were quietly laying the groundwork for a revolution that would shake the music industry to it’s very foundations and alter the flow of global information, commerce and entertainment forever.  And I can’t even begin to describe how it revolutionized direct marketing and print!

So navigate your “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System” over to the following hyperlink and witness this AMAZING story from the Dawn of the Internet Age: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html