When Engelbart introduced his demonstration in 1968, people had never seen anything like it before.
-a new set of software and hardware
-the introduction of mouse and cursor for the first time, which helped him highlight and copy things
-a projector where Engelbart can put things up on the screen
-remarkably like hypertext links, the only difference is the format
-use of a keyboard
Steven Johnson, in his book Interface Culture, describes the Engelbart demonstration as the start of the idea of spatial meta-forms. In a way, Johnson sees Engelbart responsible for the start of cyperspace because Engelbart's system is basically like a huge outline connected with links.
-similar to what Vannevar Bush thought of when he was writing about memex
-the way information is put into Xanadu is through typing as well, which is suggestive of a similarity