User technology—from pointing to pondering

ABSTRACT

From its beginning, the technology of personal workstations has been driven by visions of a future in which people would work in intimate partnership with computer systems on significant intellectual tasks. These visions have been expressed in various forms: Memex (Bush, 1945), Man-Machine Symbiosis (Licklider, 1960), NLS (Engelbart, 1963), Dynabook (Kay, 1977), and others.

The tight coupling between human and computer required by these visions necessitated advances in the ways humans and computers interact. These advances have slowly begun to accumulate into what might be called a user technology. This user technology includes hardware and software techniques for building effective user interfaces: bitmapped displays, menus, pointing devices, “modeless” command languages, animation, and interface metaphors. But it must include a technical understanding of the user himself and of the nature of human-computer interaction. This latter part, the scientific base of user technology, is necessary in order to understand why interaction techniques are (or are not) successful, to help us invent new techniques, and to pave the way for machines that aid humans in performing significant intellectual tasks.

In this paper, we trace some of the history of our understanding of users and their interaction with workstation—the personal part of personal workstations. In keeping with the spirit of other papers at this conference, we have centered this review around our own experiences, perspectives, and work and have not attempted a complete history of the field. In concentrating on our own work, we do not wish to mimimize the importance of others' work; we simply want to tell our own story. Our focus is on what we have learned about users in our years of studying them and how we see our findings relating to the original visions of the personal workstation.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

    • Personal computers and PC applications

      • Microcomputers

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document management

      • Text editing

• Hardware

  • Communication hardware, interfaces and storage

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • History of computing