History of HCI

Objectives

By the end of the class, you will be able to… – Describe major milestones in the history of HCI

and explain their impact in the discipline. – Explain why some historical products

succeeded commercially while others did not.

Memex - Vannevar Bush (1945) New knowledge does not reach the people

who could benefit from it

Bush’s Memex •  Conceived Hypertext and the World Wide Web!

–  stores all personal books, records, communications etc –  items retrieved rapidly (indexing, keywords, cross

references) –  can annotate text with margin notes –  can save a trail (chain of links) through the material

•  Based on microfilm records but not implemented

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Sutherland’s SketchPad-1963

Sophisticated drawing package •  hierarchical structures defined pictures and sub-pictures •  object-oriented programming: master picture with instances •  constraints: specify details which the system maintains through

changes •  icons: small pictures represented more complex items •  copying: pictures and constraints •  input techniques: light pen •  world coordinates: separation of

screen from drawing coordinates •  recursive operations: applied to

children of hierarchical objects

From http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/images/ivan-sutherland.jpg

Why weren’t pen interfaces adopted until recently?

•  Ergonomics – pen on vertical display •  Lack of widespread uses outside of

CAD? •  Other reasons?

Douglas Engelbart The Vision (Early 50’s)

…I had the image of sitting at a big CRT screen with all kinds of symbols, new and different symbols, not restricted to our old ones. The computer could be manipulated, and you could be operating all kinds of things to drive the computer

... I also had a clear picture that one's colleagues could be sitting in other rooms with similar work stations, tied to the same computer complex, and could be sharing and working and collaborating very closely. And also the assumption that there'd be a lot of new skills, new ways of thinking that would evolve

...Doug Engelbart

“….the human foot was a pretty sensitive controller of the gas pedal in cars. With a little work, we discovered that the knee offered even better control at slight movements in all directions. In tests, it outperformed the mouse by a small margin.”

...Doug Engelbart

Alan Kay’s Dynabook (1969) - Cardboard Mockup “Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge

manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to out-race your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores...”

Early PCs

Apple MacIntosh

Xerox Alto Xerox Star

Apple Lisa

Knowledge Navigator

•  Conceived by John Sculley of Apple in 1987

•  Envisioned tablet computers, speech production and understanding, remote collaboration, intelligent software agents

Key Points

•  Successful technologies were modeled after human needs (user centered design).

•  Evolution of ideas into commercially viable products took several iterations.

•  Computers have not always looked like the modern PC and do not need to look that way. Think outside the box when doing design.