0. History of GUI
John Kelleher

1. Why study HCI’s history?
Understanding where you’ve come from can help a lot in figuring out where you’re going - repeat positive lessons
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” - avoid negative lessons
Knowledge of an area implies an appreciation of its history

2. Context – Computing in 1945 Harvard Mark I
55 feet long, 8 feet high, 5 tons
Ballistics calculations
Physical switches (bef. microprocessor)
Paper tape
Simple arithmetic and fixed calculations (before programs)
3 seconds to multiply

3. Context – Computing in 1945 First computer bug (Harvard Mark II)
Grace Murray Hopper
Physical nanoseconds

4. Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) “As we may think” - Atlantic Monthly, 1945
Faculty member MIT
Coordinated WWII effort with 6000 US scientists
Social contract for science
Federal government funds universities
Universities do basic research
Research helps economy and national defense
Identified the information storage and retrieval problem:
new knowledge does not reach the people who could benefit from it
“The World has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”
“publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record”

5. Bush’s Memex Conceiving Hypertext and the World Wide Web
a device where individuals stores all personal books, records, communications etc
Even contemplated wearable cameras (see work at MIT Media Lab)
Encyclopedia Britannica for a nickel
Automatic transcripts of speech
items retrieved rapidly through indexing, keywords, cross references,...
can annotate text with margin notes, comments...
can construct a ‘Trails of discovery’ (a chain of links) through the material and save it
acts as an external memory!
Direct capture of nerve impulses!
Bush’s Memex device based on microfilm records, not computers!
but not implemented
Picture from
Paper:

6. Context – Computing in the 1960s
Transistor (1948)
Modern P4 has about 15 million transistors (size of fingernail)
ARPA (1958)
Advanced Research Projects Agency
Founded immediately post-Sputnik
Budget of only several million$
Modern DARPA budget about $2 Billion (2001)
Modern NSF budget about $4.5 Billion (2001)
Timesharing (1950s)
Terminals and keyboards
Computers still primarily for scientists and engineers

7. J.C.R. Licklider (1915-1990) “Lick” became director of ARPA in 1962.
With ARPA sponsorship, the first CS programs were created:
MIT, CMU, Berkeley, Stanford
Did self-observation of his daily work.
Observed that much work was mundane and related to accessing and organizing information
Proposed:
Digital libraries
Display screens with pen input and character recognition
Wall displays for collaborative work
Speech recognition and production for HCI
Outlined “man-computer symbiosis”
“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

8. Licklider’s Goals
Produced goals that are pre-requisite to “man-computer symbiosis”
immediate goals:
time sharing of computers among many users
electronic i/o for the display and communication of symbolic and pictorial information
interactive real time system for information processing and programming
large scale information storage and retrieval
intermediate goals:
facilitation of human cooperation in the design & programming of large systems
combined speech recognition, hand-printed character recognition & lightpen editing
long term visions:
natural language understanding (syntax, semantics, pragmatics)
speech recognition of arbitrary computer users
heuristic programming

9. Ivan Sutherland (1938-) 1963 PhD MIT - SketchPad
Helped head DARPA Info Processing
Now a VP and Sun Fellow
SketchPad - Sophisticated drawing package
introduced many new ideas/concepts now found in today’s interfaces
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 that represented more complex items
copying: both pictures and constraints
input techniques: efficient use of light pen
world coordinates: separation of screen from drawing coordinates
recursive operations: applied to children of hierarchical objects
Parallel developments in hardware:
“low-cost” graphics terminals
input devices such as data tablets (1964)
display processors capable of real-time manipulation of images (1968)

10. Douglas Engelbart (1925-) Strongly influenced by Bush’s article
Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
Augmentation Research Center
1962 Paper "Conceptual Model for Augmenting Human Intellect"
“...increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems....”

11. Douglas Englebart
1968: NLS (oNLine System) System, Fall Joint Computer Conference (SF)
document processing
modern word processing
hierarchical hypertext
multimedia (mixed text and graphics)
input/output
the mouse
one-handed corded keyboard
high resolution display
view control (and windows)
specially designed furniture
shared work
shared files
personal annotations
electronic messaging
desktop conferencing (video/audio managed by computer)
shared displays (what you see is what I see)
multiple pointers
user testing to see how people worked, need for training...
All took place before Unix and C (1970s), ARPAnet (1969) and later Internet

12. Douglas Englebart & NLS
"If ease of use was the only valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles." - Engelbart
"I tell people: look, you can spend all you want on building smart agents and smart tools…"
"I'd bet that if you then give those to twenty people with no special training, and if you let me take twenty people and really condition and train them especially to learn how to harness the tools…"
"The people with the training will always outdo the people for whom the computers were supposed to do the work."
“At SRI in the 1960s we did some experimenting with a foot mouse. I found that it was workable, but my control wasn't very fine and my leg tended to cramp from the unusual posture and task.”

13. Alan Kay (1940-) Ph.D. 1969 (Utah) Computer Graphics
In 1968, met Seymour Papert (LOGO) in the MIT AI Lab. - kids can program!
Moved to Xerox PARC in 1972
Started developing “Smalltalk”, in the Learning Research Group
First general OO programming language
Influenced by Simula
Atari – Chief Science Officer
Now a Disney Fellow
"By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice."

14. Alan Kay
Dynabook vision (and cardboard prototype) of a notebook computer (conceived in 1968)
“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...”
Kay develops the Xerox Alto (1972)1 and Star (1981), the first real PCs
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
1 Primary hardware developers: Butler Lampson & Chuck Thacker

15. Seymour Papert Get children to program as a technique for learning
Learn by doing
Logo
Professor MIT Media Lab
Lego Mindstorms

16. Xerox PARC Created in 1970 Some early inventions
"Architecture of information“
Camelot Era
Some early inventions
Ethernet Networking
Laser Printer
Desktop Computing
These ideas seem ordinary today
Measure of success

17. Xerox Alto First Personal Computer 1972 Precursor to Xerox Star
local processor, bit-mapped display, mouse
modern graphical interfaces
text and drawing editing, electronic mail
windows, menus, scroll bars, mouse selection, etc
local area networks (Ethernet) for personal workstations
could make use of shared resources
1972
Precursor to Xerox Star
Internal only to PARC
$45,000 / PC
ALTAIR 8800 (1975)
Popular electronics article that showed people
how to build a computer for under $400
Seed of Microsoft sown

18. Xerox Star Commercial PC 1981 $16,500 / PC
First commercial personal computer designed for “business professionals”
First comprehensive GUI used many ideas developed at Xerox PARC
familiar user’s conceptual model (simulated desktop)
promoted recognizing/pointing rather than remembering/typing
property sheets to specify appearance/behaviour of objects
what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)
small set of generic commands that could be used throughout the system
high degree of consistency and simplicity
modeless interaction
limited amount of user tailorability

19. Screen shot of Xerox Star

20. Xerox Star – Property Sheets

21. Xerox Star First system based upon usability engineering
inspired design
extensive paper prototyping and usage analysis
usability testing with potential users
iterative refinement of interface
Commercial failure
cost ($15,000)
IBM had just announced a less expensive machine
limited functionality
- e.g., no spreadsheet
closed architecture
3rd party vendors could not add applications
perceived as slow
but really fast!
slavish adherence to direct manipulation
Steve Jobs and Apple engineers visited PARC in 1979, and that set the path for Apple
15 PARC engineers migrated to Apple
Pictures from
Desktop metaphor
Windows / Icons / Menus / Pointer
WYSIWYG

22. Early Personal Computers
1997 Apple II
1979 VisiCalc - “killer app” for Apple II
1981 IBM XT/AT

23. Apple Macintosh - 1984 Aggressive pricing Good interface guidelines
$2500
Good interface guidelines
Third party applications
Great graphics, laser printer

24. Apple (1981) Apple Lisa (1983) Apple Macintosh (1984)
based upon many ideas in the Star; predecessor of Macintosh,
somewhat cheaper ($10,000)
commercial failure as well
Apple Macintosh (1984)
“old ideas” but well done!
‘Mac’ succeeded because:
aggressive pricing ($2500)
did not need to trailblaze
learnt from mistakes of Lisa and corrected them; ideas now “mature”
market now ready for them
developer’s toolkit encouraged 3rd party non-Apple software
interface guidelines encouraged consistency between applications
domination in desktop publishing because of affordable laser printer and excellent graphics