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Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad Demo
Before the mouse or the desktop window, there was a graduate student drawing straight onto a screen with a light pen. Ivan Sutherland built Sketchpad on MIT Lincoln Laboratory's TX-2 computer for his 1963 PhD thesis, and this footage shows ideas that now feel too obvious to have been invented: rubber-band lines, zooming, and shapes that can be recalled, rotated, rescaled and moved.
Nothing like it existed before, which is why computer graphics and computer-aided design both trace back to it. It makes a short, striking opener before the Engelbart demo, which pushes the same idea of working with a computer through pictures rather than punched cards.
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The Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart (1968)
If you watch only one recording here, make it this one. On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart and his team showed the mouse, linked hypertext, on-screen text editing and a live video link to colleagues in Menlo Park, all in a single session.
Almost every interface on this list borrows something from it. It is long and grainy, so dip in by topic: the first look at the mouse, the jumps between text and graphical views, and the shared screen with faces superimposed over the work. Keep in mind that this was a research system, not a product you could buy; the later entries show who turned it into one.
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Steve Jobs Introduces the Macintosh (1984)
Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh at Apple's shareholder meeting in the Flint Center in Cupertino on January 24, 1984, and the demo still lands four decades on. The machine runs its own slideshow of scrolling lettering and screenshots, then speaks in a synthesized voice: "Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag!"
The theater is fun, but the lesson is what it was selling. The mouse and the graphical screen from the Engelbart era are pitched here to ordinary buyers as the whole point of the computer, not as a laboratory curiosity. Watch it right after the 1968 demo and the sixteen-year gap between the two becomes the story.
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Microsoft Windows 95 Launch Event (1995)
This is the full recording of the event at which Microsoft launched Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, with Jay Leno hosting and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on stage. Windows 95 brought the Start button and taskbar, two ideas still sitting at the bottom of every Windows screen more than thirty years later.
It also marks the day an operating system became a consumer event, with people lining up outside stores to buy one. Be warned that Leno's material has aged badly; skip ahead to Gates and the demos if you are watching for the software rather than the period atmosphere, which is a time capsule in its own right.
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Apple Introduces the First iPod (2001)
Apple introduced the iPod on October 23, 2001 with a promise short enough for a billboard: 1,000 songs in your pocket. The original stored them on a 5 GB hard drive and could load a whole CD in under 10 seconds over FireWire, the practical details that explain why it beat the bulkier players already on sale.
For anyone studying launches, this is where Apple's later formula takes shape: one device, one plain promise, and a direct link to the company's own software, here iTunes, which synced the music automatically. It is a modest event next to the keynotes that follow, which makes the template easier to see.
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Jeff Han: The Radical Promise of the Multi-Touch Interface (TED 2006)
Recorded in February 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone was shown, this eight-minute talk has Jeff Han working a cheap, pressure-sensitive multi-touch screen with his hands rather than a mouse pointer, at a time when that still looked like science fiction.
It is a research demo rather than a product launch, so it earns its place as the bridge between the mouse era and the touchscreen era. Watch it just before the 2007 iPhone keynote to see which gestures arrived in your pocket, and how quickly they stopped looking like magic.
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Steve Jobs Introduces the iPhone (2007)
At Macworld San Francisco on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs presented what sounded like three products, a phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls and an internet communicator, before revealing they were one device. The demos that follow show the features every smartphone went on to copy: scrolling with a flick of a finger, a multi-touch screen in place of a plastic keyboard, visual voicemail and full web browsing on a phone.
The most useful thing for students is what is missing. There are no third-party apps and no store to buy them from; those arrived the following year, and the entry for that event shows how much of the phone's later value came from a decision made after this launch.
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Google's First Android Demo (2007)
Published when Google released its first Android software kit to developers in November 2007, this short video has Google's Sergey Brin and Android engineering director Steve Horowitz showing prototype phones, one in a Palm-style smartphone shape, running text messaging, Google Maps, desktop-quality web browsing through WebKit and 3D graphics.
It is a developer pitch rather than a stage keynote, and that difference is the point. Android was offered as an open platform for many phone makers, the opposite strategy to the closed iPhone shown ten months earlier. Watch the two back to back and you have the split that still divides the phone market.
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Steve Jobs Introduces the App Store and iPhone SDK (2008)
On March 6, 2008, Apple announced the iPhone software development kit, a developer program and the App Store, a single place for outside developers to deliver their apps wirelessly to iPhone and iPod touch owners. When the store opened that July, it had more than 500 apps on day one.
This excerpt from the event covers the announcement itself; Apple's own full recording, about 78 minutes long, is in its Apple Events video podcast. The announcement turned the iPhone from a closed gadget into a platform and set the pattern that every phone software store has followed since. It is the least glamorous recording on the list and, measured by what changed afterward, one of the most important.
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Steve Jobs Introduces the iPad (2010)
Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in San Francisco on January 27, 2010, presenting it as a new category of device between the phone and the laptop. It started at $499, could run almost all of the App Store's 140,000-plus apps on day one, and arrived with a new iBookstore for reading.
The lasting image is Jobs settling into an armchair on stage to browse the web, which made the case for a computer you hold rather than sit at. Tablets had been tried before; this is the launch that made the category stick, and the reason is visible here: it inherited a whole app library from the phone instead of starting empty.
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Apple Watch Unveiling, Apple September Event (2014)
Apple unveiled the Apple Watch on September 9, 2014, the first entirely new product the company made under Tim Cook. The presentation introduced the Digital Crown for scrolling and zooming, a built-in heart rate sensor, activity tracking and a developer kit for apps on the wrist.
This is Apple's full recording of the event, so the watch shares the stage with the iPhone 6 and Apple Pay; jump to its section if time is short. Its importance is less the gadget itself than the direction it set, from simple step counters toward a watch that reads your heart, the path health wearables have followed since.
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