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HCI History

Key people, events, ideas and paradigm shifts

This material has been developed by Georgia Tech HCI faculty, and continues to evolve. Contributors include Gregory Abowd, Jim Foley, Diane Gromala, Elizabeth Mynatt, Jeff Pierce, Colin Potts, Chris Shaw, John Stasko, and Bruce Walker. This specific presentation also borrows from James Landay and Jason Hong at UC Berkeley. Comments directed to foley@cc.gatech.edu are encouraged. Permission is granted to use with acknowledgement for non-profit purposes. Last revision: January 2004.

The Evolution of HCI • Series of technological advances

lead to and are sometimes facilitated by a

• Series of paradigm shifts that in turn are created by a

• Series of key people and events

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Key People• People

Vannevar Bush J. R. (Lick) Licklider Ivan Sutherland Doug Engelbart Alan Kay Ted Nelson Nicholas Negroponte Mark Weiser Jaron Lanier

ENIAC - World's first computer, 1943

From IBM Archives.

Mark I paper tape readers, 1944

From Harvard University Cruft Photo Laboratory.

Program loopswere actual loops

IBM SSEC (1948)

• From IBM Archives.

Filled about ½ a football field

Stretch - IBM’s first transistorized supercomputer, 1961

From IBM Archives.

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Context - Computing in 1960s• Computers still primarily

used by scientists and engineers

• Computers were primarily used with batch processing No “interaction” between

operator and computer after starting the run

Punch cards, tapes for input,paper printouts for output

Vacuum Tube

Jason Hong / James Landay, UC Berkeley

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J. R. Licklider, 1960• Postulated “man-computer symbiosis”

• Couple human brains and computing machinestightly to revolutionizeinformation handling

Pre-requisite to man-computer symbiosis• Time sharing of computers among

many users• Electronic I/O• Interactive real time system for

information processing and programming

Intermediate and long-term goals• Combination of speech recognition,

hand-printed character recognition & light-pen editing natural language understanding speech recognition of arbitrary

computer users• heuristic programming

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Ivan Sutherland, 1963• SketchPad - 1963 PhD thesis at MIT

Hierarchy - pictures & subpictures Master picture with instances (ie, OOP) Constraints Icons Copying Light pen input device Recursive operations