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Early Computer Interface Design: Two Archival Documents John Harwood

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Early Computer Interface Design: Two Archival Documents John Harwood Early Computer Interface Design: Two Archival Documents John Harwood Introduction The documents transcribed herein represent two crucial moments Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/31/2/41/1715398/desi_a_00321.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 in the design of the computer. The first is a short memorandum— really more like a slightly formalized set of notes—written by the art and architecture critic Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to Eliot Noyes in mid–1957. In 1956, Noyes had hired Kaufmann, along with Charles Eames, George Nelson, and Paul Rand, to aid him in the “IBM Design Consultancy”—a twenty-year campaign to redesign every aspect of IBM and develop for the corporation an autonomous means of designing and redesigning itself. Kaufmann’s notes detail his “impressions” and “hunches” regarding the design of computer interfaces,1 formed in part through his encounters with both the Noyes-designed IBM showroom for the IBM 702 and 705 computers, at the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters, and with the most recent line of computers produced by General Electric. As he noted in his cover to Noyes, the latter visit “served to confirm [his] ideas” regarding the shortcomings of IBM’s computers, whose interfaces were also designed by Noyes in collaboration with the industrial design firm Sundberg-Farrar and IBM’s own team of engineers. As I have detailed in my recent book The Interface,2 Kaufmann’s notes wholly transformed the approach that Noyes 1 Edgar Kaufmann, jr. to Eliot Noyes, 13 had taken towards redesigning IBM’s products. In true modern- June 13, 1957, Eliot Noyes Archive. The ist fashion, Noyes’s initial response to what he called IBM’s “design other memoranda reproduced here pro- schizophrenia” had been to “strip away” the mannered, cluttered viding the context for Kaufmann’s notes and inelegant surfaces of these complex machines.3 By opening are from the same string of correspon- up these opaque surfaces, he had aimed to reveal—and here his dence, running from February 26 to June language of revelation and overt Biblical reference is telling— 17, 1957, all attached to one another in the same file. the “coat of many colors” that was concealed within. Encased 2 John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and not in elaborate steel containers, but rather simple frameworks, the Transformation of Corporate Design, covered only by clear and sheer panes of glass, the computer’s 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of operators would be able, Noyes reasoned, to grasp the computer’s Minnesota Press, 2011), chap. 2. true essence. 3 Eliot Noyes, speech at Yale University, December 8. 1976, quoted in Gordon Bruce, Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2006), 146. © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00321 DesignIssues: Volume 31, Number 2 Spring 2015 41 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/31/2/41/1715398/desi_a_00321.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 1 The most successful, but still problematic, design to emerge from IBM 305 RAMAC with 350 magnetic disk drive this modernist reform of the computer was IBM’s landmark unit, 1956. Courtesy of IBM Corporate RAMAC (Random-Access Memory Automatic Computer), of 1956 Archives, Somers, New York. (see Figure 1). The primary site of Noyes’s intervention in the design of the computer was the casing for the disk drive, a rotating drum of magnetic disks that allowed the machine to quickly access and rewrite stored programs. The rest of the computer’s input/out- put (I/O) devices, for technical reasons with which Noyes had yet fully to grasp, remained more or less the same as they had in ear- lier IBM models. Noyes’s design for the RAMAC earned it high praise (and a medal) from the industrial design press at the time; yet computer engineers and operators noted that the noble rhetoric of revelation that motivated the design had hardly improved matters. Not only did the machine resemble a rather over-complicated “jukebox”; 4 it also functioned merely as a symbolic gesture. The whirring drum, while dramatic, was more a distraction to the machine’s operators than anything else. Enter—at precisely the right time—Kaufmann. Writing just as IBM was preparing to sink its entire net worth into the radi- cal project of designing an inter-machine compatible “system” of computers, known as Project SPREAD and later, as System/360 4 This accusation is related in Franklin M. (1964–; see Figure 2), Kaufmann pointed out the wrong-headed- Fisher, James W. McKie and Richard B. ness of Noyes’s approach while also offering tantalizing clues as to Mancke, IBM and the US Data Process- the proper way forward. ing Industry: An Economic History (New York: Praeger, 1983), 36. 42 DesignIssues: Volume 31, Number 2 Spring 2015 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/31/2/41/1715398/desi_a_00321.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 2 A simple compare-and-contrast exercise between images of Eliot Noyes and Associates and IBM, IBM’s computers before and after Kaufmann’s memo should System/360 Model 40, 1964. View of typical suffice to convince the reader of the importance of many of his installation. Courtesy of IBM Corporate more direct observations in the memo; however, one observation Archives, Somers, New York. in particular deserves a bit of explanation for the reader encoun- tering these ideas for the first time. In “Hunch C,” Kaufmann refers to two key concepts in the industrial design of the computer: the “‘grandfather’s gold watch’ technique” and the “‘parlor-coal cellar’ division.” These two concepts represent two sides of a historical trans- formation in computer design. With the former metaphor, Kaufmann was describing the fundamental structural and spatial nature of computing that had prevailed from the time of the com- puter’s invention just before and during World War II. These early machines, which demanded nearly constant access to mechanical and electrical components, were designed like a fob watch. A cover (a specially designed room with climate control, air filtration, etc. that regulated electro-magnetic fluctuations) concealed a clock face (the I/O devices that offered up representations of the goings-on inside the machines and the means to control those goings-on), which in turn concealed the clock mechanism (the CPU and mem- ory). Noyes’s redesigns of the IBM computer may have made this arrangement slightly more pleasant—thus the “gold” watch, rather than one made of, say, brass—but stopped well short of a more aggressive rearticulation of the spatial aspects of the machine. DesignIssues: Volume 31, Number 2 Spring 2015 43 The “parlor-coal cellar” metaphor to which Kaufmann refers was just such a rearticulation. Instead of nestling each component of the “architecture” of the computer one-inside-the- other, Kaufmann proposed rearranging these components in a manner akin to the separation of servant and served spaces in a house. The components of the computer that required them for reasons of safety and cognitive ergonomics to be separated from the space of the computer operators, and whose function and meaning would only be legible to highly specialized engineers— these could be buried away in the “coal cellar.” This would open up the space of the parlor—the space of the operators—to greater possibilities of design: the “drama” to which Kaufmann so rightly refers. Although the ergonomic redesign of the parlor Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/31/2/41/1715398/desi_a_00321.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 would still be governed by stringent technical and perceptual con- straints, Kaufmann’s domestic metaphor opened the era of com- puter interface design in earnest, and well before the advent of the graphic interfaces designed by Ivan Sutherland et al. Its impact upon Noyes and IBM Design Consultancy was immediate, and eventually the parlor and coal cellar concept became the driving force behind the design of System/360, with its apparatus of “wall” and “module” units. The second document is also a memorandum, sent by the young IBM ergonomist Serge Boutourline, Jr. to his highest boss, IBM director of research Robert S. Lee, in 1964.5 Written at an astonishingly early date, well before the burning of punch cards on college campuses or the fiery speeches of Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader decrying the excesses of bureaucratism and technoc- racy, Boutourline’s memo offers an unprecedented and exception- ally insightful view of the manifold and complex problems confronted by “user” and corporation alike as the computer trans- formed from a rarified piece of military, scientific and business equipment into a mass medium. Rather as Fred Turner’s recent book From Counterculture to Cyberculture has done in its impres- sively detailed account of the rise of the heady, pseudo-post-ideo- logical rhetoric of cybernetics and computer science,6 Boutourline’s memo traces the fault lines of an increasingly articulate infrastruc- ture of information and speculates, in terms that will be familiar to 5 Serge Boutourline Jr. to Robert S. Lee, any reader today, that the main problems of computation as a mass memorandum, Re: “IBM’s business rela- media are not technical, but rhetorical and political. tions with non-specialist computer Lee forwarded the memo to Charles Eames, who made users,” November 24, 1964 [forwarded by Lee to Charles Eames, July 20, 1965], Box extensive use of Boutourline’s observations in the Eames Office’s 146, Folder 8, “General correspondence, single largest project—a 10-year campaign to design an “IBM 1964–1970, n.d.,” Charles and Ray Museum” alongside its new corporate headquarters in Armonk, Eames Collection, Library of Congress.
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