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In 1968, Douglas Engelbart revolutionized computing by showing the mouse, hypertext, and collaborative computing in "The Mother of All Demos". Most of his ideas are now part of everyday computing, but one device—the keyset—failed to catch on. Let's look at Engelbart's demo and the keyset. 1/N
Engelbart's demo was like a PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, projected onto a large screen. He collaborated with co-workers 30 miles away, talking with them, editing shared files, browsing the code online, and clicking links with the mouse (which he invented). Impressive for 1968!
Engelbart's demo was later called "The Mother of All Demos". But first, an Intel demo at Comdex got that name. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Saddam Hussein promised "The Mother of All Battles" in the Gulf War. "The mother of all..." became a meme, applied to many things including Intel's demo.
In 1994, Wired writer Steven Levy wrote a book "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything". He discussed how Engelbart influenced the Mac, calling the 1968 demo "the mother of all demos". The name stuck, ensuring the fame of Engelbart's demo.
Engelbart's daughter, Christina Engelbart, loaned me a keyset, so I built a USB interface for it and plugged it into my laptop. I had a hard time using the keyset and I'm not surprised it didn't catch on. Supposedly it takes "only" a week to learn, too long for me.
Here's the vintage keyset with my USB interface. I used an Arduino-like microcontroller (the Teensy) to make the keyset act like a standard USB keyboard. To get upper case and special characters, you click mouse buttons at the same time. Too much coordination for me!
This reference card explains what keyset presses and mouse buttons generate each character. Memorize this chart and then you too can use the keyset. A much steeper learning curve than the mouse.
@kenshirriff And I haven't even mustered the courage to learn Dvorak. Yet. :-)