Pre-History – Web Development History

July 26, 2021 by Richard MacManus

The Time I Met Bill English

This post is to honour the one-year anniversary of the passing of Bill English, at age 91, on 26 July, 2020. English was Doug Engelbart’s right-hand man in the Mother of All Demos in 1968 and a key developer of the oN-Line System (NLS). The post below was initially part of a book I was writing about Engelbart. The book was eventually abandoned, but the memory of meeting English in 2014 remains. As does, I hope, the achievements of those SRI pioneers. RIP, Bill.

1969: Building the oN-Line System

After the Mother Of All Demos in late 1968, solid progress was made in building out the oN-Line System (NLS) over 1969. In a 1970 “final report” by Engelbart and his staff at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), the hardware and software of NLS developed over the past couple of years is outlined. The report states that “the configuration of the ARC computer facility has been relatively stable over the past two years,” but there “have been some peripheral additions, in particular the ARPA network interface and an external core system.”

1968: The Mother of All Demos

It’s Monday the 9th of December, 1968, and Douglas Engelbart, a 43 year old Silicon Valley engineer, is about to give the biggest presentation of his career. He’s going to showcase the world’s first personal, networked, computer — as a live demo. It’s the computing equivalent of a high-wire trapeze act with no net.