The Summer of Love had just been beaten into submission by the Hell's Angels at the Altamont speedway. The U.S. Postal Service raised the cost of a stamp from a nickel to 6 cents. Dr. Spock was indicted for conspiring to avoid draft law. But something else--something really big--was about to happen. Nobody quite realized it, but it was the dawning of the age of windows.

1968
Douglas Carl Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute demonstrates his oNLine System (NLS) at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. This system uses a bizarre pointing device he had devised--he calls it a mouse--along with a keyboard. During his 90-minute presentation, he manages three world debuts: the inaugural voyage of the mouse, the first onscreen video teleconferencing, and the first use of hypermedia.

Engelbart's mouse.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore leave Fairchild Semiconductor to create their own semiconductor company. They call it Intel.

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke produce a movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey, starring a new generation of computers, the HAL 9000. Among the features shared by HAL and 1990s Windows systems: voice recognition; system failures that toast your whole project; and a little tune that plays when you shut down the system. (Note: Windows 95 uses a fanfare called tada.wav; HAL 9000 trumpets a ditty called "Daisy, Daisy.")