🌱Basics/Intro

HCI (Human Computer Interactions) is a field of computer science (and interdisciplinary with social sciences) that helps to design and analyze hardware, and software interfaces that better suit people’s needs. This includes everything from the development of mice, keyboards, touchscreens etc. to design principles and policies for accessibility. In a modern context HCI is used to refer to more research-oriented topics and research groups, where once something becomes practical people tend to consider it more in the domain of design, or engineering. But, it’s important to remember that many of the technologies we take for granted now such as mice, keyboards, touchscreens, and even practices like UX are heavily informed and initially developed under HCI. Even down to something such as the psychological effects of network latency on people’s opinion of a website would fall under HCI.

Early Days

Today we take the name computer for granted. There is a long history that lead to what we call the computer, starting with the work of people like Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing. For a long time their machines, which were big mechanical systems that used punch cards to operate were the dominant force for doing computation. It took more than a century (1833-1940) for Babbage’s work to become the digital systems we know and love.

Early computers were massive and complex to operate in comparison to today¹. The ENIAC (The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first fully digital (electric), general purpose computer², and using it was not easy. You would use a combination of cables and plugs to connect the electrical signals across the machine. IT could then output the results to a set of punch cards. In general there was about 6 people ever who actually were able to program on the machine effectively. The 6 women³ spent days and days re-organizing plugs and cables to match the specifications of each individual program, and when a new program needed to be run, that work would all need to be re-done⁴. Even with all of this people realized that running mechanical machines was just much slower than running digital electric signals.

Keyboards came about as a natural extension of the typewriters at the time. They were even used (depending on how you define it) for the ENIAC⁵. Various methods were used such as punch cards, a long paper-tape system that would go into the machine as you typed, and various other attempts. Many teletype machines (typewriters with a simple form of electrical networking) could be used to send messages over a distance. These eventually developed into computer terminals. In the 1950’s Douglas Engelbart developed patents for both GUI (graphical user interfaces), and the mouse.

GUI is what we use every day, it’s what you’re currently using to view this document. It’s the idea that you want graphics to display an application, that is not just plain text (TUI or terminal/text user interface). This is the basis of essentially all modern applications, and with it the mouse is an important input device to make using GUI’s simple.

Resources

• Douglas Engelbart
  • Douglas Engelbart | Inventor of the Computer Mouse | Britannica
  • The computer mouse and interactive computing - SRI
• Keyboards
  • Who Invented Keyboard - Javatpoint
  • The History of the Computer Keyboard (thoughtco.com)
• Old computers
  • ENIAC at Penn Engineering (upenn.edu)
  • ENIAC: The First Computer (youtube.com)
  • Computer History: 1946 ENIAC Computer History Remastered FULL VERSION First Electronic Computer U.S. (youtube.com)
  • The Binac, 1949 (computerhistory.org)
  • UNIVAC, the first commercially produced digital computer in the U.S, is dedicated | June 14, 1951 | HISTORY
  • EDSAC - Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator — The National Museum of Computing (tnmoc.org)
• Modern HCI research
  • Ryo Suzuki | Interactions Lab - University of Calgary HCI Group (ucalgary.ca)
  • Research — MIT Media Lab
  • Publications - Meta Research (facebook.com)
  • Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization – Google Research
  • UCLA HCI
  • UCLA Connection Lab — We are shaping the future of human interaction.

Footnotes

1. Computer History: All About the ENIAC - HP Store Canada ↩

2. The world’s first general purpose computer turns 75 | Penn Today (upenn.edu) ↩

3. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3951187&page=1&singlePage=true#:~:text=So%2C%20too%2C%20were%20the%20historians%2C%20who%20for%20a%20half%20century%20never%20acknowledged%20the%20wartime%20contributions%20of%20the%20six%20women%20who%20programmed%20the%20Electronic%20Numerical%20Integrator%20and%20Computer%20(ENIAC)%20and%20made%20programming%20easier%20and%20more%20accessible%20to%20those%20who%20followed. ↩

4. ENIAC | History, Computer, Stands For, Machine, & Facts | Britannica ↩

5. Re: who made the first computer keyboard? (madsci.org) ↩