I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously

I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1] That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market. A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment (multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the time comes. [1]The video(100% worth watching) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos