Success famously has many parents, and SIGCHI is no exception. A strong paternity claim can be made by Bill Curtis, who garnered funding and organized ACM’s sponsorship for the Gaithersburg conference in 1982, during which plans to form SIGCHI were announced. The successful and unexpectedly profitable Gaithersburg meeting provided the model for the first CHI conference, which convened in Boston in December 1983. In this column, Bill discusses his subsequent involvement with the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. This research enterprise, largely forgotten today, was highly influential in the 1980s, hiring and providing visibility to HCI researchers, many of whom remain active. From 1986 to 1989, I was one of the occupants of that unusual building in Austin, Texas, where the fourth-floor management comprised mainly former intelligence-agency employees, while many researchers on the floors below were there in part to avoid working on Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) projects.

As Timelines editor, I would like to thank Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko for their unwavering support and assistance, and for the inspiration provided by their dedication to and outstanding stewardship of this magazine.—Jonathan Grudin

MCC’s Human Interface
Laboratory—The Promise and
Perils of Long-Term Research
Bill Curtis

CAST Software | [e-mail] November + December 2010

interactions

The mid-1980s were the first golden age for the user-interface community. The first Human Factors in Computer Systems Conference had just been completed, launching the CHI conference series. The Media Lab was being built at MIT. Groundbreaking research and books were emerging from Xerox PARC, IBM Watson, and top universities on both sides of the Atlantic. To top it off, the Macintosh would win the 1984 Super Bowl, announcing to the world that computing was coming to ordinary folks.

In 1983, 20 American companies joined to form the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), a research consortium in Austin, Texas, headed by retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Their motive was a fear that they lacked the resources to compete with foreign government-funded computing-research initiatives, most specifically the Fifth Generation Computer program in Japan. MCC was the first in what would become a series of pre-competitive industrial-research consortiums that were subsequently protected from anti-trust penalties by an act of Congress.

MCC launched four research areas, including semi-conductor manufacturing technology, software design technology, VLSI design technology, and the Advanced Computer Technology (ACT) program, which focused on creating a prototype Fifth Generation Computer. ACT included programs in artificial intelligence, parallel processing, advanced database technology, and human interface.

MCC pursued Gordon Bell, the senior guru at DEC, to head ACT and coordinate the four programs in producing the American entry into the Fifth Generation Computer race. When neither Bell nor any comparable luminary could be attracted to head ACT, MCC allowed the four programs, each under the management of a different vice president, to conduct their research independently of the other programs. I was recruited to be the founding technical director of MCC’s Human Interface Laboratory.

Without a powerful visionary to force the four ACT programs to coordinate their research toward a common objective, the programs each