The father of non-linear editing was George Lucas, who invented (or rather commissioned and paid for the invention of) the first working non-linear editor, the EditDroid. The problem with the EditDroid was one of storage. There were no hard drives big enough to hold the video, so all of the source material had to be burned onto Laserdiscs. Way too expensive for anything but full blown Hollywood productions, and there film editing still reigned supreme.
Lucas couldn't sell the EditDroid, so he eventually sold off the company to ......
Avid.
I remember those banks of laserdiscs! That is fantastic that you remember that!
Non-linear editing was the most exciting thing going. The reason my paper got so much excitement was that I interviewed EVERYBODY doing ANYTHING at the time and explained in detail the advantages/disadvantages of each of the manufacturers for my employers. Not that IBM would ever DO anything like that. It was just the way I learned things - writing it all out. So when I showed up the year after with this finished analysis, everyone wanted the info on their competitors, of course!
The one thing that was driving me crazy about what was going on in the field was that they had the opposite problem to me - they knew so much less about computers than about editing. So where I kept grinding my teeth that I wanted to be able to insert a general algorithm somewhere, like for doing ripple edits, they gave me a fixed set of preprogrammed options. I did suggest generalization of some functionality at every booth I visited, but it never made sense to them. So ripple edits, even in non-linear, still remained a major pain in the butt.
I actually still have some video I shot at the convention back in the day. Maybe I should actually look at it again! Sincerely thank you for the memories.