No excuse is too small to mention Douglas Engelbart. It just so happens that he was born a hundred years ago this year.

In some remote past I was a tutor at a school for design. How I landed the gig is one of life’s mysteries, maybe because I could do HTML when nobody I knew understood what the internet was about.

I’m really, really, really interested in beginnings. So, unsatisfied with just diving into the tech stuff, I waded my hapless students through the history of the web. Again, this was early days, a lot of them wouldn’t have had a computer at home. And there wasn’t much history to give.

Started with Tim Berners Lee at CERN of course but then jumped right into Douglas Engelbart and his Mother Of All Demos. It was indeed a wonder to behold, it would take twenty years from the moment I stood before those students until “let me share my screen” would become a common utterance. To think that Engelbart’s demo was in 1968.

It’s important to realise the state of the art of computing in 1968, and how far advanced Engelbarts technology was. Computers that filled huge rooms were fed punchcards by typing in commands in a teletypewriter. Only banks and some governments could afford them. Used for computing, and computing alone.

And there was Engelbart, who imagined that computers could augment human creativity and boost productivity by giving them tools to read, write and collaborate on a screen.

Engelbart had found a way to get funding for his Augmentation Research Center from NASA and especially from ARPA, which was at that moment well on its way to build the very first version of the internet. He managed to get a team together that in hindsight reads as a who’s who in the history of modern computing.

Engelbart demonstrated the computer mouse, edited documents on screen, did video conferencing with colleagues, hypertext, saved documents, brought up new ones. It was like Microsoft Word twenty years before Microsoft Word. Before HTML. Foreshadowed Google Drive. Google Meet. It was amazing.

It was also far too far ahead of its time. Sceptics that had earlier called Engelbart a crackpot hastily reversed their positions, nevertheless, the Mother Of All Demos remained childless for decades.

For Douglas Engelbart, the Mother Of All Demos was the defining moment of his career, a high he would never reach again. Yes, there were accolades, even a medal of honour pinned on his shirt by an American president. He was the archetypal hero who faded into obscurity in later life.

But some attendees and collaborators understood its importance and years later a young guy named Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, a campus in California that we would now recognise as the centre of Silicon Valley. And what caught his eye was the interactive screen of the Xerox Alto which could be controlled by this magical invention, the computer mouse.

The rest, as they say, is history.