Timelines provides perspectives on HCI history, glancing back at a road that sometimes took unexpected branches and turns. History is not a dry list of events; it is about points of view and differing interpretations.

Jonathan Grudin, Editor
Design Case Study:
The Bravo Text Editor
William Newman

University College, London | [e-mail]

William Newman’s definitive and engag-
ing article reveals that something we
take for granted now was once one pos-
sibility of many. Recognizing this can
provide a deeper perspective on design
choices we face today. Newman is a
meticulous student of history who cre-
ated some of that history himself, work-
ing with other pioneers at the University
of Utah, Xerox PARC, and other
institutions. He contributed to several
groundbreaking systems and co-authored
the highly influential Principles of
Interactive Graphics, published in
1973.—Jonathan Grudin
With few exceptions, today’s
screen-based text editors adhere
to a common set of user-interface
conventions. For example, they
allow users to select a position where
typed text will be added, by either
pointing to the position and click-
ing, or using the arrow keys to move
the insertion point vertically or
horizontally. They allow the selec-
tion of a sequence of characters, by
clicking down and dragging across
the text, or a sequence of words by
double-clicking and dragging. Once
selected, text can be deleted by press-
ing the Delete key, or it can be moved
to a new position by clicking down
on it and dragging it. Conventions
like these underpin the standard text-
editing user interface found in today’s
computer applications. The wide
adoption of this standard ensures
that users can move easily from one
editing program to another, without
needing to learn from scratch how
to use each one.

xerox PARC and the Alto
The histories of Xerox PARC and
its Alto personal computer have
been thoroughly documented [ 1, 2, 3]
and need not be retold here in full.
Certain aspects of the Alto’s design
deserve mentioning, however,
because they had a strong influence
on the design of early text editors.
From the outset, PARC’s manage-
ment bought into the arguments of
its senior scientists, notably Butler
Lampson and Alan Kay, that Xerox’s
future lay with personal comput-
ers and with the applications they
could make available to every office
worker. The key application domain,
argued Lampson and others, would
be document preparation, and
the first step should be to develop
a powerful personal computer,
capable of displaying and manipu-
lating lengthy documents involving
proportionally spaced, variable-size
typefaces [ 4]. It was also clear, early
on, that there would be problems in
designing such a text editor, given
that the Alto had only 128K bytes
of main memory, and nearly half
of this was required to store a full-
page image for display on the bit-
mapped screen.

January + February 2012