Since launching our “Politics and the Internet” Timeline last August, we’ve gotten dozens of suggestions for revisions and additions from all kinds of people. We made a few right off the bat, and then decided to let them accumulate and do updates on a more periodic basis. The winter holiday break also seemed like a perfect time to get some distance on events, in terms of deciding what to include or leave out from recent developments in our world. As I noted in the original post on the timeline, this isn’t an “official” list, but rather just our subjective judgment of the most important and notable developments at the intersection of technology and politics in the United States, online, and in the international arena. If you would like to suggest an important development that we may have missed, or make a correction to the record, please use this form.
Here’s what we’ve added:
December 9, 1968–Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos”
On this day at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, inventor and computer pioneer Douglas Englebart, along with 17 researchers working with him at the Stanford Research Institute, made a 90-minute live demonstration of an array of experimental technologies including the computer mouse (which he invented), video conferencing, hypertext links, word processing, “what you see is what you get” editing, and collaborative real-time editing. The historic demonstration is widely regarded as having blazed the trail toward human-computer interaction, showing how the computer could be used for everyday tasks. Video of Englebart’s presentation can be watched
December 30, 2012