The Mother of All Demos

Or MOAD, For Short

The crowd gathered in a darkened conference room, anticipating another predictable presentation on a boring overhead projector.

Instead, what they witnessed was nothing short of revolutionary, leaving the audience stunned. They watched as characters—letters and numbers—appeared on a screen and then were deleted and manipulated in a way imaginable only in a science fiction book, graphic manipulation, and the control of an on-screen pointer using a curious device the presenter called a “mouse.”

Then, the audience saw something perhaps even more revolutionary: they watched as two computer users who were across the country from one another used a "networked information system" that allowed them to see a shared “Google Doc” in a primitive form of todays Internet.

Growing up Gen X, I remember the advent of the World Wide Web well. I was first exposed to chatrooms and the larger web in 1994, and quickly came to learn about Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 hypertext and 1990’s publication of the first we…