"It was a real gamble in all kinds of ways," Douglas Engelbart recalled Thursday. "For one thing, having that much brand-new technology leveraged on top of brand-new technology -- [we had] a homemade modem, and the display system was homemade, and the time-sharing could be flaky."

"Everything we built was the first of its kind."

Engelbart, now 73, will relive those nervous moments next week at Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, a symposium to be held at the Stanford University Memorial Auditorium.

Aside from its honored guest, the 9 December event will feature Marc Andreessen, Stewart Brand, Alan Kay, Jaron Lanier, Ted Nelson, Howard Rheingold, Terry Winograd, and Andy van Dam. Host Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, will lead the discussion of what the world has learned -- and what Silicon Valley can still gain -- from Engelbart's work.

For his part, Engelbart will have a tough time topping his last big Bay Area gig.

His San Francisco demo of 5 December, 1968, at the American Federation of Information Processing Societies’ Fall Joint Computer Conference, stunned the computing world. That day, Engelbart and his team of visionaries from the Stanford Research Institute had the chance to show off what they'd been up to.

The 90-minute session showcased a mouse-driven interface (his rolling pointer prototype was made of wood!), hypermedia, multiple windows, outline processing, display editing, context-sensitive help, and many of the other computing functions now at users' fingertips.

"That 1968 presentation was one of the rare moments when people were transformed by what they saw," said Henry Lowood, curator for the history of science and technology collections at the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives, a facility that collects and preserves historical materials from the dawn of the digital age.

"I did a scaling study in the '50s that convinced me that there was going to be all the bandwidth you could ever use, and that every knowledge worker [was] going to be equipped," Engelbart said.

A light went on in Engelbart's head that day.