1962 Spacewar videogame
1963 Sutherland Sketchpad Ph.D. thesis
1965 Nelson hypertext
1969 Engelbart SJCC Demo
1969 Kay Reactive Engine Ph.D. thesis
1970 Founding of Xerox PARC
1970 Founding of HUSAT
1971 Weinberg’s The Psychology
of Computer Programming `
1973 Martin’s Design of
Man-Computer Dialogues
1973 Alto personal computer
1973 Superpaint color frame buffer
1974 Gypsy WYSIW YG word processor
1975 Altair personal computer kit in
Popular Electronics
1976 Kay and Goldberg’s “Personal Dynamic Media”
1980 Aaron Marcus’s first tutorial
1981 Xerox Star
1981 IBM PC
1982 Gaithersburg Conference/CHI formation
1983 Card, Moran, and Newell’s Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
1983 Shneiderman’s “Direct Manipulation”
1983 Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information
1984 Apple Macintosh
1985 Gould and Lewis’s “Designing for Usability”
1986 Norman and Draper’s User Centred System Design
1987 First Hypertext conference
1987 Suchman’s Plans and Situated Action
1990 Tim Berners-Lee Web browser
1990 First Usability Professionals Association conference
Figure 1. Timeline of Early HCI History
mapped displays, the desktop metaphor, What You
See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) document editing, overlapping windows, icons, and menus? How
did the invention and refinement of these concepts
interrelate?
A Broadening of Focus
We now reach a turning point in HCI history.
The invention and widespread success of the PC
enabled hundreds of millions of humans to interact with computers, in contrast to a few million
organizational mainframes and tens of millions
of minicomputers. A wider set of issues became
relevant.
Graphic Design and
Industrial Design in Interaction Design
For computers to become mainstream consumer
products, they had to look as good as sports cars
and hair dryers. Thus industrial design would
play a key role. Furthermore, one reason the GUI
became the dominant interface paradigm of the
’80s was that graphic designers and visual artists began to exploit bit-mapped displays to make
interfaces more attractive and communicative.
What were the roles of design pioneers such as
Aaron Marcus and Edward Tufte in inspiring such
developments? How did this movement influence hardware and interface software in seminal
products such as the Star, the Apple II, and the
Macintosh? How did the graceful design sense
of these products manifest itself and become an
essential element in other mainstream software
products? How did industrial research groups,
product-development teams, and scholars and
practitioners from universities and design schools
contribute and interact?
Usability Testing
By the ’80s it became apparent that there was
another implication of the fact that the computer
had become a mass-market product for nonspecialists. To design software successfully required
usability testing, a set of techniques that draw
their inspiration from human factors.
What are the earliest known examples of user
testing? How did the concept of “usability testing” evolve into more comprehensive “usability
engineering?” Who built the first usability lab?
What were the important innovations by hardware
companies such as IBM and DEC, and by systems