Foreword

In 1968, in a presentation that would later become known as the “the mother of all demos,” computer scientist Douglas Engelbart and his team started the personal computer revolution by demonstrating a system that featured text editing on a screen, his newly invented mouse, mixing of text and graphics, outline views, hypertext links, screen-sharing, and even videoconferencing. At a time when computers were room-sized machines conceived to outperform humans at computational tasks, he instead proposed that they help the human perform intellectual tasks, “augmenting” human intelligence by becoming interactive assistants in everyone’s daily work. The graphical user interface was born.

But in addition to its groundbreaking interactivity, Engelbart’s system is also interesting for the way it was built: it was written in several different programming languages that were specifically designed for it and adapted as the system changed. Building a truly innovative system also required building appropriate languages to program it. The next important milestone inspired by Engelbart’s vision was the Xerox Alto system in 1973. In addition to introducing the desktop metaphor and other user interface innovations, it also featured the first object-oriented language, Smalltalk.