From What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff page 148:Doug Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, “dealing lightning with both hands.”  At least that’s the way it seemed to Chuck Thacker, a young Xerox PARC computer designed who was later shown a video of the demonstration that changed the course of the computer world.On December 9, 1968, the oNLine System was shown publicly to the world for the first time.  Encouraged by Taylor, Engelbart had chosed the annual Fall Joint Computer Conference, the computer industry’s premier gathering, for Augment’s debut.  In the darkened Brooks Hall Auditorium in San Francisco, all the seats were filled and people lined the walls.  One the giant screen at his back, Engelbart demonstrated a system that seemed like science fiction to a data-processing world reared on punched cards and typewriter terminals.  In one stunning ninety-minute session, he showed how it was possible to edit text on a display screen, to make hypertext links from one electronic document to another, and to mix text and graphics, and even video and graphics.  He also sketched out a vision of an experimental computer network to be called ARPAnet and suggested that within a year he would be able to give the same demonstration remotely to locations across the country.  In short, every significant aspect  of today’s computing world was revealed in a magnificent hour and a half.