Have you seen the Douglas Engelbart’s demo in 1968, which often referred as “The Mother of All Demos”. It was shocking at that period of time, Engelbert and his team at Stanford Research Institute shown their first made demo made by a screen display that attach to the main computer behind the stage, and a mouse, very unique one, which has three action trigger and lead to different actions, for example, clicks, group and cancel click. The third part is an touch pad, has multiple pads that can do something cool like copy and paste, which at that period of time, it is profound because no one will think that the new technology computer can do something like work and type, and even store files that provide a change for personal use.
To me, the first time people think of interaction with a complex machine, that basically is an extension of human brain, we tend to forget things we know, so that we really need a base to collecting the datas and put them in to a permanent storages that we can pull out later. Also, people want them to be organized and clearly to see, not doodling, but with high fidelity. So that people will not mass up in the future. As well, people need to delete documents that is expired and the first demo from Douglas Engelbart’s team can definitely do that, it pave the foundation for future computers, the modernized personal laptops.
Another significant contribution from the demo was the introduction of early Graphical User Interface (GUI) concepts. Because people are not even on the stage that thinking about design in computer use, it was formed with functional base instead of beauty, however, if this need to be use daily and personally, the requirement of prettiness need to put in the list. People want to do real time collaboration though the interaction design are also available. To sum up, all of these features are totally forward-looking at that time as well as now.