window vs. windows

In may talk at the recent SHOT conference in Pittsburgh I argued that the user interface is a worthy object of historical inquiries. It is old, it is well known, it is widespread, and it carries some interesting stories that mirror the developments in society. In order to push my point forward I got the idea to search for window and for windows using Google Image.

What do you think the outcome is?

Do the searches deliver images of windows in houses?

Or do they deliver a certain Microsoft product?

Yes and no. window yields exclusively house-windows – one might thinks that window in plural yield even more house windows! No so. windows yield exclusively images associated with Microsoft Windows: about half are Windows brand icons while the other half are the Windows user interface – the well known screen image. I find that this modest informal investigation can be taken as a strong  indication of the strength of footprint of the user interface in our culture.

By the way, what do you think happens when you do a similar search for apple and apples ,-/

Google image search for window and windows – first four hits

 

Two local collections in Denmark

I’ve recently come across two local computer history collections in Denmark. The first collection is at SDU – Southern University of Denmark – where farsighted employees over the years have collected computers, hardware and other items. The collection encompasses the first IBM pc from 1981 (in working order!), several Apple Lisas (even one including the original cardboard box) – see the pics below - and several Next computers. The collection is described in an article (in Danish!) in the local newspaper Fyens Stifttidende.

The collection has been established by Einar Hougs, Hans Boye, and A. Ormicki. I became aware of the collection through mathematician Bjarne Toft who has strong interest in Piet Hein’s games. Unfortunately, SDU no longer wants to host the collection; some of the items may be taken over by Dansk Datahistorisk Forening.
The other collection is in CSC – where historically interested former employees Jens Peter Søltoft, Carsten Laugesen, and Flemming Svane-Petersen have established an archive. It is based on documents and items gathered over the years by themselves and other employees. So far the three “curators” are looking for a suitable way to index the collectibles.

SHOT 2009 in Pittsburgh

SHOT – an acronym for Society of the History of Technology – held its annual meeting in Pittsburg from Oct. 15-18. The last day was dedicated to the late professor of history at Princeton Mike Mahoney who passed away last year. In the last decades he has done a tremendous effort to increase the interest in history of computing. [His excellent papers can be downloaded from his webpage.]

A full day with four sessions focussing exclusively on history of computers was organized by SIGCIS [Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society]. In the first, the three distinguished historians Bill Aspray, University of Texas at Austin, Thomas Haigh, University of Milwaukee, and Gerard Alberts, University of Amsterdam addressed various aspects of Mahoney’s life and work.

Aspray presented a personal account of Mahoney – at times moving, at times stunning, at times humourous – while Haigh focussed on the central contributions of Mahoney. It was interesting to see that Haigh had selected the same three papers out of Mahoney’s 19 papers on computer history as I had in my presentation “User Interface History – a Mahoneyan Perspective”.  In addition, Haigh used several of the same citations as I, for example regarding the state-of-art in history of computing in 1988: “There historians stand before the daunting complexity of a subject that has grown exponentially in size and variety, looking not so much like an unchartered ocean as like a trackless jungle. We pace on the edge, pondering where to cut in.” This quote describes precisely my situation in user interface history in 2009!

Nimbi in Weekendavisen

The recent issue of Weekendavisen – a highly respected Danish weekly newspaper – published an article in the Oct. 23-30 issue on the early game development project that featured my current colleague Søren Lauesen and the Danish poet, inventor and game developer Piet Hein. The article is in Danish and comes in part 1, pdf 2.4 MB and part 2, pdf 0.6 MB
The article – in Danish unfortunately – is based on my recent paper “Context and Driving Forces in the Development of the Early Computer Game Nimbi” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. The paper can be downloaded from the post below.

Unusual UI-constraint in an early computer game

My exploration of an early computer game development has been published recently in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (download article pdf 9.3 MB). The unusual UI aspect of the game is that – unlike many contemporary computer games played on the computer terminal or console as typed characters – the designers of this game opted for a proper game board, i.e to adhere to the principle of user interface consistency (having the computer representation of the real world mirror the real world). Fine – but do note that this principle was not at all coined in 1962-63 when this development took place. What farsighted game designers!

In those early days, connecting an unusual I/O device was cumbersome: the game board became hardwired to the central register of the Gier computer. This meant that only one computer was equipped to play the game – that in turn implied that the game was never used as intended to promote computers towards the public.

Reference A H Jørgensen: Context and Driving Forces in the Development of the Early Computer Game Nimbi. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 31, No. 3, July-September 2009, 44-53.

ENIAC programmer Jean Bartik

Do you recall the pictures of ENIAC programmers at work: moving plugs and setting switches while standing up and keeping track of the program on sheets of papers?

In a recent issue of Communications of the ACM (vol. 52, no. 1, p. 17) a one-page article A Pioneer Woman by Michael Ross appeared, featuring a very interesting project ENIAC Programmers Project run by Kathy Kleiman. Abeit short, the aticle is really interesting as it brings this famous chapter of computing history to (more) life.

Regarding user interfaces, the article discloses that there were no manuals available for the for the ENIAC programmers. So the programmers, among these Jean Bartik, “pored over its logical and electrical block diagrams and discussed design details with the male engineers and physicists who had created ENIAC.”

GUI/OS resource page

Several collegues have directed my attention to an interesting website
Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009. The website comprises a fine range of systems, and not only lists well-known systems like Xerox Star, Lisa, Mac, Amiga Workbench, and Windows, buts also less known ones like GEM, KDE, and GNOME. Regarding user interfaces, the website presents fine screenshots from all the systems. I find that the term Operating Systems is a bit misleading as the paper does not present the command line interfaces of UNIX, LINUX, etc. So I suggest you think of the site as a GUI history site.

Excellent introduction to computing history for computers scientists

Thomas Haigh published an excellent introduction to computing history URL some years ago. It addresses a large number of relevant aspects of computer and computing history, including the practice of historians work (compared to that of computer scientists), relevant sources, snippets of the history of the history of computing, different kinds of history areas, etc.

As the paper appears in an edited volume on using history in the teaching of computer science, the paper also carries a section on this relevant topic.

As to user interfaces, the paper carries nothing of particular interest. But user interface history is emebedded in the history of computing, this topic is very valuable.

References

Haigh, Thomas (2004): The History of Computing: An Introduction for the Computer scientist. In: Aspray, W. and Atsushi, A. (2004): (eds): Using History to teach Computer Science and related disciplines. Washington DC: Computing Research Association, 5-26.

Akera, Atsushi and Aspray, William (2004) (eds): Using history to teach computer science and related disciplines. Computing Research Association, Washington.  
The whole  volume can be downloaded in Pdf (note 1.7 MB,   309 pages)

Documents from the SIG available

The documents from the UI History SIG are now available for download under the page “materials”:
– the powerpoints
– the minutes by Brad
– the list of participants
– the list of literature cited in the introduction

Contact

In case you want to contact me, send me an email or leave a comment on the blog.