December 9 · This Day in America
A thousand computer professionals file into a hall in San Francisco expecting another dry talk. Instead, Doug Engelbart sits at a console, picks up a small wooden box with a wire tail, and the screen behind him comes alive. He clicks. Words move. Windows open. He pulls up another person, thirty miles away in Menlo Park, and they edit the same document together while their faces float on the screen. The mouse. Hypertext. Video conferencing. Word processing. Live collaboration over a network. All of it, in one room, in one afternoon, in 1968. Most of the audience has never seen a computer respond to a human in real time. Engelbart's team had spent months wiring microwave dishes and a homemade modem so this could happen at all. They are not demonstrating a product. They are showing the next fifty years of your life, and they know it.
Source: www.sri.com
Also on this day · 1935
At the Downtown Athletic Club in New York, Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago is handed a bronze statuette of a running back stiff-arming the world. It is the first one ever given. He carried his own gear, played both ways, and once said the trophy made a fine doorstop at his aunt's house. Eighty-some years later, every great college player in America wants to be where he stood first.
Source: www.heisman.com