Chapter?2.?History: A Brief History of User Interfaces
Show me the face you had before you were born.
--
Traditional Rinzai Zen koan
Software designers who don't understand history often find
themselves doomed to repeat it, often more expensively and less
productively than the first time around. So it's worth taking a look
at the history of user-interface design to see what kinds of trends
and patterns we can discern that might still inform today's
practice. We'll draw some specific lessons from this history, but
many others await the discerning reader.
One of the largest patterns in the history of software is the
shift from computation-intensive design to presentation-intensive
design. As our machines have become more and more powerful, we have
spent a steadily increasing fraction of that power on presentation.
The history of that progression can be conveniently broken into three
eras: batch (1945-1968), command-line (1969-1983) and graphical (1984
and after). The story begins, of course, with the
invention
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of the digital computer. The opening
dates on the latter two eras are the years when vital new interface
technologies broke out of the laboratory and began to transform users'
expectations about interfaces in a serious way. Those technologies
were interactive timesharing and the graphical user interface.