Truly Trivial: What technology was the subject of 1968's famous "Mother of All Demos?"

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One Dec. 9, 1968, a watershed moment in computer science and consumer electronics took place: a technology demonstration now known as The Mother of All Demos. The events of the MoAD arguably lit the fire that eventually set forth the technological, cultural, and economic conflagration that was the invention of the modern personal computer. It's just that no one really knew it at the time.

A pair of researchers named Douglas Englebart and Bill English coordinated to MoAD under the somewhat immodest title of "A research center for augmenting human intellect" at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. In attendance at the FJCC was Butler Lampson, who went on to help found Xerox's Palo Alto Research Conference (PARC) in 1970. Two years after that, Lampson wrote a memo titled "Why Alto?" which outlined his vision for a new type of computer -- the Xerox Alto -- based in part on what he saw at the Mother of All Demos.

The Xerox Alto is rather infamous in computing circles. First for the many modern technologies the Alto integrated into what we now recognize as a modern personal computer, including a computer mouse, Ethernet, file servers, and a graphic user interface with a desktop metaphor. Second, because Xerox decided there wasn't a market for the Alto and refused to produce it commercially. The latter point is often considered one of the great missed opportunities in business history.

You'll likely not be surprised to learn a young engineer named Steve Jobs got a first-hand look at a prototype Alto at Xerox Parc in 1979, and it inspired him to build the first Macintosh. The Mac, in turn, so impressed Bill Gates that he originally licensed part of its GUI for Windows 1.0, which Gates himself later licensed for IBM PCs with some multibillion-dollar, world-changing success. (Though there was some rather ugly fallout from the Windows vs. Mac similarity, some of which still rages today.)

Thus, you can draw a straight line from the Mother of All Demos to whichever personal computer -- be it Mac, PC, or a GUI flavor of Linux -- sitting on your desk right now. Lost in all the fervor, however, was the actual inspirational technology displayed at the MoAD.

What technology was the subject of 1968's famous Mother of All Demos?