In 1968, Doug Engelbart demonstrated the oNLine System (NLS) which his lab at SRI, the Augmentation Research Center, had created over the previous 10 or so years. "With this group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers, he staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal computing when a computer mouse controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing."[source]
This demo is quite impressive given today's technology, but when you
consider that an really great computer in 1968 had an interface like the
picture above, then you really begin to see the massive impact that the
oNLine System demo had. It was the first system to realize Vannevar
Bush's dream of hypertext as well as basically demonstrating what
computer interfaces basically look like today.
AUGMENTING
HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework
Doug Engelbart's
Bootstrap Institute
Video of the 1968 demo at the Fall Joint Computer
Conference
MouseSite,
a resource for exploring the history of human computer
interaction