I had the pleasure of meeting (and attending a presentation by) Don Neilson – a recently retired Vice President of SRI International (originally Stanford Research Institute) and author of "A Heritage of Innovation: SRI's First Half Century".

Mr. Neilson discussed his new book and his lifelong association with innovation through his work at SRI. Mr. Nielson gave a fascinating presentation on the history of SRI International, reviewing several landmark projects, key players, and the culture of excellence that serves as the foundation of the organization. Did you know they provided the research behind the site location and operational design of the original Disney Theme Park?

The reason you want to view this presentation is for the several fascinating videos from SRI's historic demo of interactive computing from the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, CA. At this event, Douglas C. Engelbart introduced several landmark technologies, including the computer mouse, a graphical user interface, display editing and integrated text and graphics, hyper-documents, and two-way video-conferencing with shared workspaces.

Remember, this was 1968 – years before Apple – years before Xerox.

The videos start on slide nine (the presentation is generated from PowerPoint, and the videos are WMV-format files. Accordingly, viewing the presentation and films is best done in Internet Explorer. On slides 9, 10 and 11 – click on the main image to start each video).

If you've never seen these videos, I highly recommend watching them – I found them fascinating!

The source of this presentation was from the Enthiosys customer appreciation day, a partner providing strategic software product management consulting to help create profitable new products and services based on deep customer understanding.