Tuesday, December 9 will mark forty years since Silicon Valley legend Doug Engelbart captivated a crowd at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with a technology demonstration that was about as cutting edge as it gets.

“If you used a mouse to click to this article, you have Doug Engelbart to thank for it” is how I began an article covering the 30th anniversary. How true. But it wasn’t just the mouse. Engelbart’s 90-minute presentation back in 1968 is considered the first public demo of personal and interactive computing.

A video of the event shows Engelbart using a computer mouse (quite amazing when you consider most people didn’t see a mouse used as a navigation device till the debut of Apple’s Macintosh in 1984), and controlling a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, and shared-screen teleconferencing.

The commemorative event at Stanford on December 9 costs $25 general admission or $10 for students. The agenda includes talks by some of the participants in the 1968 demo, including Engelbart and Alan Kay. Among his other accomplishments, Kay basically pioneered the concept of mobile computing with his idea of a ‘Dynabook.’

This should be one of the hotter tickets in Silicon Valley.