Computer industry celebrates 40 years

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. computer industry and Silicon Valley are marking the 40th anniversary Tuesday of the premiere of the personal computer.

Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI International -- known at the time as Stanford Research Institute -- gave the first public demonstration of the mouse and other fundamentals of modern computing Dec. 9, 1968.

SRI, which has been separate from Stanford University since 1970, said it will hold a celebration Tuesday afternoon in Memorial Auditorium at Stanford to commemorate what has been called the "mother of all demos."

The 1968 demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco included the debut of hypertext linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, real-time on-screen text editing, shared-screen teleconferencing and the computer mouse.

"No one has ever before or since seen such a collection of great ideas in one demonstration," SRI President and Chief Executive Officer Curt Carlson told the San Francisco Chronicle.