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GUI History Abridged "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer “What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user.” –- an IBM technician lambasting the Apple Lisa’s GUI "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 1 1930’s Vannevar Bush, American engineer. Worked on analog computing and on the Manhattan Project. Wrote of an adjustable microfilm viewer he called the "Memex," looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time. However, starting in about 1937 several groups around the world started constructing digital computers. 2 1940’s World War II needed programmable calculating machines calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes. The perfection and commercial production of vacuum tubes provided the fast switching mechanisms these computers needed to be useful. In 1945, Bush revisited his older ideas in an article entitled "As We May Think," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and it was this essay that inspired a young Douglas Englebart to try and actually build such a machine. Douglas Englebart commonly called the father of the GUI Completed his B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1948 (Oregon State University) and worked at the NACA Institute (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA). He recalled Bush's essay and started thinking about ways in which a machine could be built that would augment human intellect. During the war he had worked as a radar operator o he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them. 3 1950’s Englebart went to UC Berkeley to learn everything he could about computers, Got his PhD in 1955, and was told to be very careful about who he talked to about his "wild" ideas. After a year of teaching at Berkeley as Acting Assistant Professor, he took a position at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, hoping one day to pursue his vision there. He received many patents for miniaturizing computer components and founded Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center (ARC). The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line System, better known by its odd abbreviation, NLS. ARC is also known for the later invention of the "computer mouse" pointing device. By 1959 he had earned enough recognition to receive funding from the United States Air Force to work on his ideas. 4 1960’s In 1962, Englebart published his ideas in a seminal essay entitled "Augmenting Human Intellect." Argued that digital computers could provide the quickest method to "increase the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems." He envisioned the computer not as a replacement for human intellect, but a tool for enhancing it. One of the first hypothetical examples he described for this technology was of an architect designing a building using something similar to modern graphical CAD software. The only computers that existed at the time were giant mainframes, and typically users would interact with them using what was called "batch processing." A user would submit a program on a series of punch cards, the computer would run the program at some scheduled time, and then the results would be picked up hours or even days later. Even the idea of having users enter commands on a text-based terminal in real-time (called "time-sharing" in the jargon of the day) was considered radical back then. Englebart and his growing staff worked for years to develop the ideas and technology that finally culminated in a public demonstration in front of over a thousand computer professionals in 1968. Englebart's demonstration was a multimedia extravaganza: television cameras were trained on his face, his hands, and the small display screens he was viewing. The cameras faded in and out between all three views, often showing more than one at the same time. This level of demonstration was necessary because so many of the concepts being shown were completely new. The system was called NLS, or oN-Line System, because it was also networked between multiple computers. The display system was based on vector graphics technology and could display both text and solid lines on the same screen. Because of limited memory space in the mainframe computer, it could only display upper-case characters. This was the so-called mother of all demos.[7] 5 Englebart 's hands operated three input devices: a standard typewriter-style keyboard, a five-key "chording keyboard" (combinations of the five keys could produce 2^5 or 32 separate inputs, enough for all the letters of the alphabet), and a small rectangular box about the size of a couple of juice boxes with three buttons near the top, connected to the computer with a long wire, the first mouse. User testing found the mouse to be the most natural way to manipulate an on-screen cursor. This remains true today. Englebart patented the mouse in 1970. It was called an "X-Y position indicator for a display system". Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end. He never received any royalties for his mouse invention. During an interview, he says "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000." 6 The demo was very forward-looking and featured: hypertext linking, full-screen document editing, context-sensitive help, networked document collaboration, e-mail, instant messaging, even video conferencing! It was all somewhat overwhelming, and due to limitations in the video system, sometimes difficult to tell what was going on. For example, NLS supported multiple windows, but there was no obvious way to indicate boundaries between them (such as window borders, title bars, etc) Englebart received the Turing Award in 1997. The demos (a short and long version) are available at Mouse intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MPJZ6M52dI&feature=related Shorter: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=- 8734787622017763097#docid=2734283989313597675 (starts at 1:30 minutes in, 3:30 in, 4:30 in shows keyboard and mouse). Longer: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=- 8734787622017763097# (starts at 1:30 minutes in), A screen from the NLS demo. The red circle indicates the mouse pointer. 7 ARC was closed down in 1989 due to lack of funding. There was never enough money to turn these ideas into commercial products. That job was undertaken by a company that most people associate with old-fashioned paper. Ivan Sutherland (Turing Award 1988) invented Sketchpad, an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "As We May Think." Alan Kay (Turing Award, 2003) presenting Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg (4:17 minutes) This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan, "Sketchpad, A Man- Machine Graphical Communication System". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA&NR=1 (10:34 minutes) 8 1970’s Xerox PARC Xerox upper management, fearing the inevitable demise of their paper- based company in the "paperless" future, decided that they had better make sure they controlled this new technology. They formed the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in 1970. PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc.), formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology. Founded in 1970 as a division of Xerox Corporation, PARC has been responsible for such well known and important developments as laser printing, the Ethernet, the modern personal computer graphical user interface (GUI), ubiquitous computing, and advancing very-large-scale- integration (VLSI). Incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox in 2002, PARC currently conducts research into biomedical technologies, "clean technology", user interface design, sensemaking (ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation), ubiquitous computing, large area electronics, and embedded and intelligent systems.
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