The most important technological event of December 1968 may not have been the Earthrise photo, but the first demo of hypertext, the essence of plug-and-play AI

Fifteen days before the 1968 Earthrise photo by William Anders, the Mother of all Demos started the tech revolution that led to the AI movement we have now. Our Earth appears so small and far away in Anders’s photo, but at that very moment, momentous things were happening at Stanford Labs, where the first mouse and hypertext were being demonstrated in the weeks before Anders's iconographic photo of planet Earth. While a photo of Earth from the moon was clearly a stunning moment of acknowledgment about Earth’s place in the universe, the impact of the mouse and hypertext may not have been so