Interesting fact: apparently the video was shot by Stewart Brand, who crops up at a surprisingly large number of other key points in the history of computer science (he created the Well, a highly influential early online community, and has some involvement with the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club which gave birth to Apple, among other things). These days he's running the Long Now Foundation. My girlfriend and I are convinced he's a time traveller from the future.
I remember coming across NLS (Englebart's system at SRI) in 1972-73, using it over the ARPAnet (there were about 20 nodes back then). Even then, without much contextual knowledge, and without special graphics consoles, it was clear that this was something special.
In some sense, it's still better than current shared-editing systems, an early and more structured Google Wave, if you will.
Do not use url shorterners.
Do not create a linkbaiting title.
That said, the demo by Doug Engelbart from 1968 (which is what you should have used as a title) is very impressive. I saw it ten years ago in my human-computer interaction course, and everyone was completely blown away by it then, and it's still very impressive.
"The mother of all demos" was used for this particular demo by Douglas Crockford in one of his public lectures about Javascript, http://yuiblog.com/crockford/. I also recommend watching that, btw.
Besides the fact that this title is catchy - what's wrong with that? - it also tells more about the content than "the demo by Doug Engelbart from 1968". Surprisingly, not that many people know or care who Doug Engelbart is.
Ok, I didn't know about that. I can understand why they would seem unwanted, even though I don't see a reason to ban them, since I'd think links with shortened URLs would simply not be voted up in the first place...
Why am I being down voted? I'm trying to understand this guy's opinion. I don't understand why he made that comment, so I was wondering if it was a rule on HN or if he simply didn't like URL shorteners in general.
Dunno why you got voted down, but it's a rule here not to use them. URL-shorterners are very handy sometimes but here they are completely unnecessary, there's no 140-char limit...
