The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

Alan Kay struggled to make sure that he got to Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. He had a 102-degree fever and strep throat, but he was able to drag himself onto a plane from Utah, where he was a graduate student. “I was shivering and sick and could barely walk,” he recalled, “but I was determined to get there.”44 He had already seen and embraced Engelbart’s ideas, but the drama of the demonstration struck him like a clarion call. “To me he was Moses opening the Red Sea,” Kay said. “He showed us a promised land that needed to be found, and the seas and rivers we needed to cross to get there.”45 Like Moses, Engelbart would not actually make it to that promised land. Instead it would be Kay and a merry band of colleagues at the research center of a copier company who would be at the forefront of bringing the ideas of Licklider and Engelbart into the paradise of personal computing.