The Future & History of the User Interface

An anonymous reader writes "The Mac Observer is taking a look at UI development with lots of video links to some of the latest developments in user interfaces. It also has links to some of the most interesting historical footage of UI developments, here's one of the 1968 NLS demo. From the article: 'Sadly, a great many people in the computer field have a pathetic sense (or rather ignorance) of history. They are pompous and narcissistic enough to ignore the great contributions of past geniuses... It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"

One of the coolest things...

[scorp1us]

Was a memory storage system that consisted of liquid mercury. A speaker at one end would cause waves to travel the length of the vat of mercury. At the other end, it was measured by a inducer(microphone) and re applified then sent back to the speaker. If you wanted to change a bit, you had to wait for it to come around and short it to ground, or inroduce a tone. Your amount of memoery was limited by the length of your tube and the viscosity of the mercury.

Re:Overlapping windows

[Anonymous Coward]

When you open a new window, does it hide gray areas, or real information?

Unless you're using an extremely poor window manager, it hides the gray areas. Either that or you need to go into your KDE or Gnome preferences where you can specify this.

What are you using? IIRC this was considered a significant innovation in window managers when I was finishing college in the 90s; but certainly hasn't been a problem for at least a decade.

Re:Intuitiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

You're aware he invented the thing, right?

but you get it wrong.

[geekoid]

the first computer bug was not found by ada lovelace.
uit was found by Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNR, (1906-1992)

http://www.maxmon.com/1945ad.htm [maxmon.com]
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers- h/g-hoppr.htm [navy.mil]
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h 96566kc.htm [navy.mil]

she was an excellent speaker who could make anybody understand anything, a real gift.

Even the most elementary exercise with your brain would ahve allowed you to figure why it couldn't have been Ada Lovelace.

Re:Creaky and old fashioned? How about useful.

[kwark]

I personally can't think of any use for it but a Multi-Pointer X Server already exists:
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/ [unisa.edu.au]

Re:but you get it wrong.

[nuzak]

The fact that Hopper found this bug to be a play on words at the time when she found it suggests rather strongly that the term "bug" was around long before then.

Edison used the term quite a bit. In fact, it goes all the way back to Shakespeare.

Re:Intuitive User Interface

[Dr. Zowie]

Can you now tell me why the common head gesture for "yes" is to shake the head up and down...

Why, yes, I can: societal training. In Bulgaria the opposite gestures apply. In Turkey, "yes" is a back-and-forth shake and "no" is a sort of head-rearing gesture. Don't trust me -- trust Cecil Adams [straightdope.com]...

Re:One of the coolest things...

[mincognito]

This is a form of delay line memory [wikipedia.org] used by the Univac 1.

Much better video is at the Sloan MouseSite

[raist_online]

Greets! http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html [stanford.edu] The Sloan MouseSite has better video where you can actually read what Doug has on the screen! I've been lucky enough to see this video with commentary by Doug - he's still around, still has ideas relevant and ahead of most of the rest of the computing world and is always glad to discuss his ideas with people. You can find out his current plans at the Bootstrap Institute: http://www.bootstrap.org/ [bootstrap.org]

Smoothwheel

[CaptainCarrot]

Thanks for pointing that out! I was wishing there was something like this. You, and others who have pointed the same thing out, are perfectly correct that a smooth scroll ought to be the behavior with the mouse wheel.