History of Usability & HCI

  • Some of the most important work done in the field of HCI is the result of university efforts, not industry
  • Direct Manipulation (phrase coined by Ben Schneiderman in 1982) goes back as far as 1963 in Ivan Sutherland's PhD Thesis at MIT
    This was an important development toward the current interfaces known as WYSIWYG, selection of objects and text, point-and-click selection techniques, iconic representations, and dynamic menus
  • The Mouse was born in 1965 at Stanford Research Laboratory (SRI)
    Later made practical by Xerox PARC in 1970s
  • Windows: The concept of multiple windows was first developed in 1968; commercial integration responsible for popularity were Xerox Star (1981), Apple Lisa (1982) and Apple Macintosh (1984)
  • Drawing programs began in 1963 and in 1965 the use of a mouse to create graphics was introduced; first drawing program was Markup (1975); first painting program was Superpaint (1974-75)
  • Text editing began with the first word processor in 1962; the first WYSIWYG editors were Star, LisaWrite and MacWrite
  • VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet (1977-78) developed by students at MIT for the Apple II
  • The idea of hypertext is credited to Vannevar Bush's idea of MEMEX (1945); the phrase was coined by Ted Nelson (1965); it has evolved into the WWW concept which was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (1990)
  • Computer Aided Design (CAD) began in 1963 with General Motor's DAC-1
  • Video Games: 1st video game to use graphics and joystick was SpaceWar (1962, MIT); First commercially popular video game was Pong (1976)

Brad A. Myers. "A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology." ACM interactions. Vol. 5, no. 2, March, 1998. pp. 44-54.