By watching “The Mother of All Demos” and “The History of IBM”, we can learn a lot from their demo, some of it is still success to today’s interaction designer to practice. But also some of them could be better.
Doug Englebart and the Stanford team have done many demos on the computer during that time. and most of their demo is tried to type in some word and built up data than the computer will be tied to use those pieces of information to calculate the answer that solves problems humans have. The main idea and the demo are all showing how those feature gonna work for human right now or in the future which relates to today’s practice of interaction design, try to solve problem people has.
But it only did half of the work to interaction design. As the first-generation product, those demos were done by just a group of people, it might not cover some user’s need. And because it didn’t have other products to compare, so it’s hard to learn from others and made their own calculate system or computer better. So there is still a lot of lack of the user experience inside the demo.
I also agree that at the time of this demo’s release, it wasn’t as perfect was what we see and use today. But, everything has to start somewhere right? Whether if it’s lacking features or not.
I agree with your critical analysis at the end. It’s the summary of these analyses that makes the user experience in demo better and better.
I agree on the idea of “lack of comparison”, I also agree that they didn’t cover the mojor groups of people for tehir design.