I know a good deal about the tech legend Stewart Brand–creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of the seminal piece of tech journalism “Spacewar,” etc.–but I didn’t realize that he was present in 1968 at Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos.” In a new Wired interview with Kevin Kelly, in which he acknowledges bio-hackers and calls for the de-extinction of bygone life forms, Brand remembers the effect Englebart’s demo had on him:

“Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called ‘the mother of all demos’—when Stanford’s Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?

Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.

Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner today—drones, magic glasses, self-driving cars—are just premature promises?

Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I don’t mean that just in terms of power or capacity—driven by Moore’s law—but also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.”

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“The Mother of All Demos”: