A brief History of HCI

  • HyperText

    The idea for hypertext (where documents are linked to related documents) is credited to Vannevar Bush's famous MEMEX idea.
  • Space War

    The first graphical video game was by Slug Russel of MIT in 1962 for the PDP-1
  • Direct Manipulation Interface

    Where visible objects on the screen are directly manipulated with a pointing device, was first demonstrated by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad
  • RAND tablet

    The first pen-based input device,
  • 3-D CAD

    The first 3-D system by Timothy Johnson
  • Gesture Recognizer

    Teitelman in 1964 developed the first trainable gesture recognizer.
  • The Mouse

    Was developed at Stanford Research Laboratory as part of the NLS project (funding from ARPA, NASA, and Rome ADC) to be a cheap replacement for light-pens.
  • TVEdit

    Was one of the first CRT-based display editors that was widely used.
  • VR

    The original work on VR was performed by Ivan Sutherland when he was at Harvard
  • Light Handles

    Provided direct manipulation of graphics, a form of graphical potentiometer, that was probably the first "widget."
  • AMBIT/G

    It employed, among other interface techniques, iconic representations, gesture recognition, dynamic menus with items selected using a pointing device, selection of icons by pointing, and moded and mode-free styles of interaction.
  • Lincoln Wand

    The "Lincoln Wand" by Larry Roberts was an ultrasonic 3D location sensing system, developed at Lincoln Labs, also had the first interactive 3-D hidden line elimination. An early use was for molecular modelling.
  • UIMS

    The first User Interface Management System (UIMS) was William Newman's Reaction Handler created at Imperial College, London
  • Hypertext Editing System

    The Hypertext Editing System from Brown University had screen editing and formatting of arbitrary-sized strings with a lightpen.
  • TECO

    MIT's early screen-editor
  • The mouse in a movie

    Many of the current uses of the mouse were demonstrated by Doug Engelbart as part of NLS in a movie created in 1968
  • Multiple Tiled Windows

    Multiple tiled windows were demonstrated in Engelbart's NLS in 1968
  • Mouse-based editing

    NLS demonstrated mouse-based editing
  • The FRESS project

    The FRESS project at Brown used multiple windows and integrated text and graphics
  • Computer Supported Cooperative Work

    Doug Engelbart's demonstration of NLS included the remote participation of multiple people at various sites
  • Idea of Overlapping Windows

    Alan Kay proposed the idea of overlapping windows in his 1969 University of Utah PhD thesis
  • Electronic Mail

    Electronic mail, still the most widespread multi-user software, was enabled by the ARPAnet, which became operational in 1969, and by the Ethernet from Xerox PARC in 1973.
  • NLS Journal

    The "NLS Journal" was one of the first on-line journals, and it included full linking of articles.
  • COPILOT

    Stanford research on text editor
  • EMACS

    MIT research on text editor
  • Overlapping Windows Appear

    They first appeared in 1974 in Smalltalk system at Xerox PARC, and soon after in the InterLisp system.
  • Superpaint

    The first computer painting program was probably Dick Shoup's "Superpaint" at PARC
  • Bravo

    was the first WYSIWYG editor-formatter
  • Icons

    David Canfield Smith coined the term "icons" in his 1975 Stanford PhD thesis on Pygmalion [41] (funded by ARPA and NIMH) and Smith later popularized icons as one of the chief designers of the Xerox Star
  • Markup

    Developed by William Newman was the first drawing program for Xerox PARC's Alto
  • EIES

    An early computer conferencing system was Turoff's EIES system at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
  • PROMIS

    was the first Hypertext system released to the user community. It was used to link patient and patient care information at the University of Vermont's medical center.
  • Pong

    The first popular commercial game was Pong
  • The concept of DMI for everyone

    The concept of direct manipulation interfaces for everyone was envisioned by Alan Kay of Xerox PARC in a 1977 article about the "Dynabook"
  • VisiCalc

    The initial spreadsheet which was developed by Frankston and Bricklin for the Apple II while they were students at MIT and the Harvard Business School. The solver was based on a dependency-directed backtracking algorithm by Sussman and Stallman at the MIT AI Lab.
  • First commercial uses of windows

    Some of the first commercial uses of windows were on Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI) and Symbolics Lisp Machines
  • The Interactive Graphical Documents project

    The Interactive Graphical Documents project at Brown was the first hypermedia (as opposed to hypertext) system, and used raster graphics and text, but not video
  • The Steamer project

    The Steamer project at BBN demonstrated many of the ideas later incorporated into interface builders and was probably the first object-oriented graphics system.
  • Xerox Star

    The first commercial system to make extensive use of Direct Manipulation
  • The first commercial mouse

    It first appeared commercially as part of the Xerox Star
  • The Cedar Window Manager

    The Cedar Window Manager from Xerox PARC was the first major tiled window manager
  • Windows commercial systems

    The main commercial systems popularizing windows were the Xerox Star (1981), the Apple Lisa (1982), and most importantly the Apple Macintosh (1984).
  • Trillium

    was developed at Xerox PARC
  • Apple Lisa

    The second commercial system to make extensive use of Direct Manipulation
  • Direct Manipulation

    Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland coined the term and identified the components and gave psychological foundations
  • The Diamond project

    The Diamond project at BBN explored combining multimedia information (text, spreadsheets, graphics, speech).
  • The Movie Manual

    The Movie Manual at the Architecture Machine Group (MIT) was one of the first to demonstrate mixed video and computer graphics
  • David Kasik

    The term "UIMS" was coined by David Kasik at Boeing.
  • Andrew window manager

    Developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Information Technology Center
  • Hyperties

    was the first system where highlighted items in the text could be clicked on to go to other pages
  • Component Architectures

    The idea of creating interfaces by connecting separately written components was first demonstrated in the Andrew project by Carnegie Mellon University's Information Technology Center.
  • Macintosh

    The third commercial system to make extensive use of Direct Manipulation
  • The X Window System

    The X Window System, a current international standard, was developed at MIT in 1984. For a survey of window managers.
  • Resource Editor

    The Macintosh included a "Resource Editor" which allowed widgets to be placed and edited.
  • SOS Interface

    Jean-Marie Hullot created "SOS Interface" in Lisp for the Macintosh while working at INRIA which was the first modern "interface builder." Hullot built this into a commercial product in 1986.
  • InterViews

    An early C++ toolkit was InterViews, developed at Stanford
  • NeXT Interface Builder

    Jean-Marie Hullot created NeXT Interface Builder
  • World Wide Web

    Tim Berners-Lee used the hypertext idea to create the World Wide Web at the government-funded European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN).