Skip to content
Arne Noori
Aboutarne.ai
← All artifacts
oN-Line System Chord Keyset

oN-Line System Chord Keyset

Image creditMichael Hicks
CC BY 2.0 ↗

oN-Line System Chord Keyset

Year
1968
Creator
Douglas Engelbart, Bill English, Augmentation Research Center staff
Company
Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Augmentation Research Center
Location
San Francisco Civic Auditorium (demo); SRI, Menlo Park (system)

Description

The oN-Line System, or NLS, was a shared computer workspace at the Augmentation Research Center of SRI. People used it with a mouse, a keyboard, and a five-key chord keyset like this one for the other hand.

Importance

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart operated NLS live for 90 minutes at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The demonstration showed hypertext links, text editing, several windows, and video calls with colleagues at SRI. Xerox PARC later built many of these ideas into the Alto.

Interesting fact

The computer that ran the demonstration was at SRI in Menlo Park, approximately 30 miles from the stage in San Francisco.

Sources

  1. Computer Mouse and Interactive Computing ↗SRI International
  2. The Demo (1968) ↗Doug Engelbart Institute
  3. Firsts: The Keyset ↗Doug Engelbart Institute