Software designers who don't understand history often find themselves doomed to repeat it, often more expensively and less productively than the first time around. So it's worth taking a look at the history of user-interface design to see what kinds of trends and patterns we can discern that might still inform today's practice. We'll draw some specific lessons from this history, but many others await the discerning reader.
One of the largest patterns in the history of software is the shift from computation-intensive design to presentation-intensive design. As our machines have become more and more powerful, we have spent a steadily increasing fraction of that power on presentation. The history of that progression can be conveniently broken into three eras: batch (1945-1968), command-line (1969-1983) and graphical (1984 and after). The story begins, of course, with the invention[6] of the digital computer. The opening dates on the latter two eras are the years when vital new interface technologies broke out of the laboratory and began to transform users' expectations about interfaces in a serious way. Those technologies were interactive timesharing and the graphical user interface.
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