The Early History of Personal Computing: A Bibliography

PART ONE:

GENERAL SOURCES ON THE HISTORY OF HCI One useful historical overview is Chapter 1 of Baecker, R.M. and Buxton, W. (1987), Readings in Human Computer Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Morgan Kaufmann. (A slightly improved version appears in Baecker, R.M., Grudin, J., Buxton, W., and Greenberg, S. (1995), Readings in Human Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, Morgan Kaufmann.) Three others are Shackel, B. (1997), “ Human-Computer Interaction—Whence and Whither,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48( 11); Myers, B. (1998), “A Brief History of Human-Computer Interaction Technology,” interactions, March-April; and Grudin, J. (2007), “A Moving Target: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction,” in A. Sears and J. Jacko (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, Erlbaum. Two excellent edited volumes on the early history of personal computers are Gupta, A. and Toong, Hoo-min D. (Eds.) (1985), Insights into Personal Computers, IEEE Press; and Goldberg, A. (Ed.) (1988), A History of Personal Workstations, ACM Press. A good journalistic account is Levy, S. (1984), Hackers, Anchor Press/Doubleday. Licklider is discussed in depth in Waldrop, M.M. (2001), The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal, Penguin Books. More than 40 recent interviews with important interaction designers are reported in Moggridge, B. (2007), Designing Interactions, MIT Press. Erickson, T. and McDonald, D. (Eds.) (in press), HCI Remixed, MIT Press, presents personal accounts of the impacts of seminal papers. A useful website is maintained by the Georgia Tech Program in Human-Centred Computing, see http://hcc.cc.gatech.edu/taxonomy/cat. php?cat= 2.

Hurst, J., Mahoney, M.S., Taylor, N.H., Ross, D. T. & Fano, R.M. (1989), “Retrospectives: The Early Years in Computer Graphics at MIT, Lincoln Lab, and Harvard,” ACM SIGGRAPH’89 Panel Proceedings, Part I and Part II; Machover, C. (1978), “A Brief, Personal History of Computer Graphics,” IEEE Computer 11( 11), November; Wayne Carlson’s “Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation,” ( http://design.osu.edu/carlson/ history/ ID797.html); and also chapters by Gordon Bell, Doug Ross, and Wesley Clark in Goldberg (1988). An important historical panel is Buxton, W. (2005), “Interaction at Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960s: Looking Forward — Looking Back.” Panel Introduction, Proc. CHI 2005, 1163-1167, also see http://www.billbuxton.com/Lincoln.html, and the ePresence video archive of the panel, http://epresence.tv/ Presentation/3. The Sketchpad thesis has been reprinted as Sutherland, I.E. (1963), “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System,” MIT Ph.D. Dissertation ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ techreports/ UCAM-CL-TR-574.html). Direct manipulation was defined in Shneiderman, B. (1983), “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages,” IEEE Computer, August. The development of Spacewar is recounted in Levy, S. (1984), Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Anchor Press, Chapter 3. A series of computer-aided design history timelines is at http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-History.htm. An archive devoted to the history of using computer graphics to visualize biological macromolecules, starting with the work of Cyrus Levinthal and colleagues at MIT in 1964-67, is http://www. umass.edu/molvis/francoeur/.

March + April 2008

PART TWO: HYPERTEXT

The original article is Bush, V. (1945), “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176( 1). But see also Rayward W. B. (1994), “Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Hypertext,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 25( 4), May, describing an early Belgian “information scientist” who anticipated some key aspects of hypertext. Much has been written about Engelbart and Nelson. Most useful for learning about Engelbart is Bardini, T. (2000), Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Stanford University Press, and Oinas-Kukkonen, H. (2007), “From Bush to Engelbart: ‘Slowly, some little bells were ringing,’” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29( 2), April-June, 31-39, which relies on interviews, includes a comprehensive bibliography, and details Bush’s influence. A monumental early book is Nelson, T. (1974), Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now, and, on the flip side, Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens—a Minority Report, self-published, out of print. A useful set of resources, http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/, includes Andy Van Dam’s keynote address at the first Hypertext Conference in 1987.

PART THREE: INTERACTIVE COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND DIRECT MANIPULATION For accounts of the early history of interactive graphics, see

PART FOUR: GUI AND WIMP INTERFACES The best account of the development of the Xerox PARC Alto personal computer, the Superpaint color frame buffer, and the earliest implementations of the graphical user interface is Hiltzik, M. (1999), Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Harper Business. An earlier journalistic account focusing more on the business context is Smith, D.K. and Alexander, R.C. (1988), Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer, William Morrow. An excellent scholarly account of the desktop metaphor is in Blackwell, A. (2006), “The Reification of Metaphor as a Design Tool,” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 13( 4). The earliest W YSIWYG word processors were Bravo and Gypsy developed at Xerox PARC; for information about Gypsy development see the interviews with its developers, Tim Mott and Larry Tesler, in Moggeridge (2007). Overlapping windows, a key feature of most GUIs, emerged in the pioneering Smalltalk environment developed by Alan Kay’s group at PARC (Kay, A., and Goldberg, A., 1976, Personal Dynamic Media, Xerox PARC Technical Report SSL- 76-1). Early thoughts that led to the concept of personal dynamic media are found in Kay, Alan, “The Reactive Engine,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Utah, 1969. A comprehensive first-person account of the development of Smalltalk is Kay, A. (1993), “The Early History of Smalltalk,” ACM Sigplan Notices 28( 3). See also two recent publications: Barnes, S. (2007), “Alan Kay: Transforming the Computer into a Communications Medium,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29( 2), April-June; and Maxwell, J. (2007), “Tracing the Dynabook: A