Ch1 - My Vision Isn't My Vision: Making a Career Out of Getting Back to Where I Started
William Buxton
Microsoft Research, Toronto, Canada
This chapter was about a music guy who gets plugged into digital music in the 70's. Via his brother, he sits down with the device, called Mabel, located at the NRC. Not being fluent or adept at the keyboard, he didn't use it very much. Instead he used two dials to make each note. He found this to be very intuitive. He noted this as a significant achievement in CHI because it was one of the first systems to be designed with the naive user in mind, particularly music people. You did not need a computer scientist to program the notes in, but simply do what felt natural.
He proceeded to contrast that with today's systems which are not as user friendly and talks about his life's work as being to make computer systems that user friendly again.
Ch4
Drawing on SketchPad: Reflections on Computer Science and HCI
Joseph A. Konstan
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A
In this paper, the author discusses Sutherland's SketchPad program. It used a light pen to draw on a million pixel display, draw and repeat patterns, integrate constraints, link shapes, etc. He talks about how natural is is for people to be able to point at what they want to manipulate rather than using devices like a mouse. He claims the system even anticipated Object Oriented programming by using ring buffers and inheritance in the program.
He goes on to philosophize about why programmers limit themselves to what the computer already has to offer.
Ch5
cThe Mouse, the Demo, and the Big Idea
Wendy Ju
Stanford University, Stanford, California, U.S.A.
In this paper, the author talks about the effects of introducing new revolutionary concepts into HCI, specifically the introduction of the mouse. He talks about how the demo by Doug Engelbart was not initially received well at all. Even though he had invented techniques such as drag and drop with it it didn't fit with any of the predominant schools of thought at the time.
Discussion:
I feel like the mouse demo paper reminds me a lot about the introduction of color into the realm of computer displays. Color was viewed as nice but it wasn't viewed as actually enhancing productivity and was slow to being adopted by the computer world at large.
