History of GUI

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History of GUI

• John Kelleher

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Why study HCIs history?

• Understanding where youve come from can help a
  lot in figuring out where youre going - repeat
  positive lessons
• Those who dont know history are doomed to
  repeat it - avoid negative lessons
• Knowledge of an area implies an appreciation of
  its history

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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

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Context Computing in 1945

• First computer bug (Harvard Mark II)
• Grace Murray Hopper
• Physical nanoseconds

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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
devicesof 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
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Bushs 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!
• Bushs Memex device based on microfilm records,
  not computers!
• but not implemented

Paper http//www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks
/computer/bushf.htm
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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

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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.

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Lickliders 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

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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
  todays 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)

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Douglas Engelbart (1925-)

• Strongly influenced by Bushs 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....

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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...

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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.

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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."

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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
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Seymour Papert

• Get children to program as a technique for
  learning
• Learn by doing
• Logo
• Professor MIT Media Lab
• Lego Mindstorms

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Xerox PARC

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

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Xerox Alto

• First Personal Computer
• 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

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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 users 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

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Screen shot of Xerox Star
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Xerox Star Property Sheets
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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

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Early Personal Computers

• 1997 Apple II
• 1979 VisiCalc - killer appfor Apple II
• 1981 IBM XT/AT

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Apple Macintosh - 1984

• Aggressive pricing
• 2500
• Good interface guidelines
• Third partyapplications
• Great graphics,laser printer

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Apple (1981)

• Apple Lisa (1983)
• 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
• developers 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