Daily List

Today in History, December 9th

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" previewed the mouse. Plus smallpox's eradication and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published December 9, 2025 · Last updated November 10, 2026

December 9 is best known for Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos,” the 90-minute show in San Francisco that previewed the mouse, linked text and video calls. The date also saw experts certify the eradication of smallpox in 1979 and the first broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965.

The big story: The “Mother of All Demos” (1968)

Picture a room of about 1,000 computer professionals in 1968, most of whom worked with punch cards and printouts. On December 9, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute sat down at a console and spent 90 minutes showing them the future. He steered a cursor with a small hand-held box, the device we now call a mouse. He edited text live on screen, split the display into windows, and clicked links that jumped from one document to another. He even showed shared-screen teleconferencing, a distant ancestor of the video call. The crowd gave him a standing ovation. Very little of it reached ordinary people right away. Over the next two decades, though, his ideas fed into the personal computer, the graphical interface and the web. Engelbart’s patent for an “X-Y position indicator,” the mouse, was issued in 1970.

More events on December 9

Year	What happened
1824	Antonio José de Sucre’s patriot army defeated a larger Spanish royalist force at the Battle of Ayacucho in Peru, effectively ending Spanish rule in South America.
1917	Ottoman troops pulled out of Jerusalem, and city officials surrendered it to the British during World War I. General Edmund Allenby walked into the city two days later.
1961	Tanganyika became independent from Britain.
1965	A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first animated TV special built on the Peanuts comic strip, premiered on CBS. Roughly 15 million viewers tuned in.
1979	A global commission of experts certified that smallpox had been eradicated. The World Health Assembly made it official in May 1980.
1987	The First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, began with protests in the Gaza Strip a day after a deadly traffic crash.
1990	Lech Wałęsa, the shipyard electrician who led the Solidarity movement, was elected president of Poland.
1992	About 1,800 U.S. Marines landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, at the start of Operation Restore Hope, a mission to restore order so aid workers could deliver food during the country’s civil war.
2003	A high-level conference opened in Mérida, Mexico, where governments began signing the UN Convention against Corruption. The date is now marked as International Anti-Corruption Day.
2016	South Korea’s National Assembly voted 234 to 56 to impeach President Park Geun-hye over a corruption scandal.

Born on December 9

1608: John Milton (Old Style), English poet who wrote Paradise Lost.
1886: Clarence Birdseye, inventor who figured out how to quick-freeze food for grocery store shelves.
1906: Grace Hopper, mathematician, computer pioneer and U.S. Navy rear admiral.
1916: Kirk Douglas, Hollywood film star and producer.
1934: Judi Dench, English actress of stage and screen.