A Historical and Intellectual Perspective
by R. M. Baecker & W. A. S. Buxton

The first computers were made in the late thirties. Then computers were viewed merely as advanced calculators. There was no real interaction with the computers, and user friendliness was an unknown term. It was not important to make the computers easy to use since only experts used them. Vannevar Bush (1945), however, had higher aspirations. In his article As we may think he describes a machine that can store unlimited amounts of data that is indexed in a way that makes it easily accessible. Further links can easily be added, data can be text or images and the user should be able to choose from several interfaces such as keyboard, speech and even direct transmission between the machine and the brain (!). He called his system MEMEX. The reason for these ideas was that he was concerned about the time it took to produce scientific articles. Needless to say no MEMEX was ever built but his ideas has served as a blue print for a lot of properties found in modern computer systems.

In the fifties researchers began thinking about the computers abilities to aid creative thinking and problem solving. Licklieder (1960) coined the term man-computer symbiosis. He predicted that human brains and computers would be merged in some way to create new astonishing resources for data processing. Licklieder published a list of problems that had to be solved before his vision could come true. What he described was really an artificially intelligent system, and as we know these systems have proven fairly hard to produce, but many of Licklieder's ideas, like time-sharing, multipurpose output displays and speech recognition, have found their way into today's technology.

In the sixties the first real research was being conducted in the area. It consisted mainly of quantitative studies. The research changed in the seventies when psychologists and experts in human relations became involved and the psychology of HCI began to evolve (see Card et al., 1983). When the interaction between user and system were becoming more direct this opened a new area of research, were Martin (1973) played an important role in popularising these issues. 1971 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was founded. The goal was to develop a new kind of computers. The result was the personal workstation with its own memory, processor, graphical high-resolution display, keyboard and mouse. They also developed the graphical interfaces with windows and menus. The workstations were networked to access shared resources. In the mid-seventies came the personal computer with which the use of computers spread to new groups of users that brought computers into new areas. This intensified the need for more user friendly interfaces. In the eighties the ideas from Xerox PARC made a breakthrough in the PC user interface area led by the Macintosh computer from Apple.

While this field of research steadily increases it becomes more and more obvious that the achievements made so far should only be viewed as a starting point for further research.

References

• Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176 (July), 101-8.
• Card, S. K., Moran, T. P. and Newell, A. (1983). The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Licklieder, J. C. R. (1960). Man-computer symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-8(1), 4-11.
• Martin, J. (1973). Design of Man-Computer Dialogues, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.