Homer was going to San Francisco. He wore no flowers in his hair.

In the city of flower children, hippies, and counterculture, it was easy to miss the couple hundred suited men and the few determined-looking women lining up to see something that would change the world even more drastically than the activists wanted it to.

It was a slightly cloudy afternoon when Homer lined up to see "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect". Bob Sproull, a mutual acquaintance of his and the presenter, Douglas Engelbart's, had asked him to come. It would be well worth the cold, Bob promised.

Homer was starting to regret listening to Bob as the line inched forward in the cold. Anybody from the East could have easily laughed at him for shivering since it was just under sixty degrees. But given that practically all of the computer scientists on both sides of the border were coming down to Los Angeles for a piece of the action, he wasn't going to apologize for being born in North America's hottest spot for technology. To his right he saw a set of fire-escape stairs running up the building, turning around, then redoubling back over their own path. He hoped he wouldn't have to use them in the show; they ended abruptly over ten feet over the sidewalk.

The line turned a corner and Homer now beheld the facade of the grand neoclassical Civic Auditorium, San Francisco's greatest concert hall. The line was now filtering out into different exhibits and displays. Finally Homer got to the gate and a teenager sitting in the booth imperfectly stamped his ticket.

Apparently nobody thought nerds deserved something soft to sit on. Homer's seat was hard as a high school lab stool. "Can we switch seats?" A man snapped him out of his reverie. "Where's yours?" Homer responded without missing a beat.

"Over there," he pointed as Homer got up. Homer seemed to detect him considering whether or not to stiff Homer and sit down in his seat after he got up without leading him to the seat he had traded for, and deciding against it. This was a wise choice because nearly everyone in the hall was separated from each other only by one or two colleagues or former colleagues, and opportunities of revenge would therefore present themselves relatively easily.

"Sorry--let me take you. Can you save my seat?" The man addressed no one in particular to indicate his good faith, as was expected. "It's OK, I'll sit in any random seat I find," Homer waived this courtesy, as was expected.

Homer saw Bob Sproull's head bobbing (Homer excused his own atrocious pun) in the crowd entering the auditorium behind him. He shuffled to Bob, accompanied by plenty of "excuse me"s and dirty looks, and together they plonked themselves down on a pair of seats somewhere in the middle row

The lights dimmed and the crowd stilled after a few seconds and began to fixate on the motion of the shadows onstage they noticed. When the Fresnel lanterns turned on, Homer saw a man seated at a computer terminal to the audience's right of the stage.

An image began to show on the big screen in the front of the auditorium. It was of Doug Engelbart, at the terminal. Homer looked back. A man was operating a video camera and the image it captured was somehow being projected onto the big screen in black and white.

"He's been working on this for nine months. Give him a hand," prompted Bob.

The two began a round of applause which reverberated throughout the hall.

Doug was warming up. He seemed nervous and the audience tried all it could do to reassure him. They cared about the steak, not the sizzle.

"For many intellectual workers, there is the question 'if I had a computer terminal, what could it do to help me? What value could it add to my work?' This is what I'm going to show you today."

The display on the screen of the terminal started to be superimposed on the image of Doug speaking.

"We'll start simple. Let's make a statement, consisting of words."

Doug typed STATEMENT ONE: WORD WORD WORD WORD...there were about 20 "WORD"s.

"If I make a mistake, I can go back," he deleted the last word. Homer realized the labor he could have saved if only his typewriter could do that. "I can copy a group of words," he selected a few words and added them to the end. "And if I think this is important enough, I can save it and it'll be a file."

He saved it. "Let's call this SAMPLE FILE. Once we save it we can go back and look at the status. You see this was written by me a moment ago and entitled SAMPLE FILE. Now, let's go back to the file."

"If I want to, I can do this."

Just then Homer saw a little black dot darting around the screen like a bug. He saw that Doug had in his hand a weird little box and that the movement of the dot reflected Doug moving the little box on the table with his hand.

"I can copy this statement and make another statement."

The same block of text reproduced itself below STATEMENT ONE.

"I can even copy a group of statements."

Doug selected both blocks of text and they became four blocks of text, all identical.

"This is a bit long. I can collapse this so it only shows the first line of each statement."

The blocks became six lines, each beginning with STATEMENT ONE: WORD WORD WORD WORD...