No, no. That's a slight misinterpretation of what I said:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Adam Parker
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
...
>
> It's interesting you've noted the absence of a distinct understanding of
> the notion of HCI in the PARC community. This particular lack of context
> did not become apparent to me from the papers and secondary materials
> surrounding the Alto that I've read to date. Thanks, that's quite
> enlightening.
>
The Xerox PARC Alto was developed in 1973. the field of HCI was not
established (My book on User-Centered System Design came out in 1986.
My first paper on the topic of HCI, The Trouble with Unix, came out
in 1983. in the US until 1982.)
The field of HCI did not exist when the Alto was born. You were wrong
in stating there was a distinct lack of understanding of HCI at PARC:
If there was any group in the country that had knowledge, it was at
PARC in those days (the pioneering efforts of Card, Moran, and Newell,
which I mentioned in my post). I was a consultant to Alan Kay's group
(although most of my work was with Danny Bobrow and Terry Winograd --
both doing natural language understanding at the time. A lot of the
future leaders in HCI were around PARC in that period, but HCI would
not exist until ten years after the Alto, and even then, in the
beginning it was mostly concerned with command-line interfaces such as
in Unix and MS-DOS and Apple II. Graphical machines were still very
limited: the Apple Lisa didn't come out until 1983 and the Mac in
1984.
When did HCI develop? In the United States, the first official
conference was the Gaithersburg, Maryland conference in 1982. That was
where it was decided to form CHI (not HCI, but CHI because you could
pronounce it). Sure, by 1982 there had been enough research done in
the US and Europe to be able to hold a conference, but nobody yet
thought it was a field.
So, your statement was wrong in the sense that there was no HCI for
PARC to be unaware of. If anything, the early work at PARC is what
directly influenced the development of HCI. Larry Tesler's methods
work was one of the critical starts of iterative design. (Larry was at
PARC and moved to Apple when Apple started the Lisa project, as did a
number of other Xerox PARC employees.)
A good example of the lack of a field is me. Although I was an early
user of the Alto computer and its software (Bravo and Poet, etc.), it
never occurred to me that this was worthy of study. Sure, I knew of
Englebart's work and I also worked with Alan Kay who was developing
Smalltalk, but I was a psychologist at the time, and AI and Language
Understanding was what seemed interesting. The work of Card, Moran and
Newell was interesting and I spent a lot of time with them, but I was
far more interested in the work Newell and Simon had done in problem
solving then in their work on computers. And in fact the Card et al
group used thinking aloud to study text editing.
Revolutions are incredibly difficult to see if you are living inside
of them. Outsiders can see them better.
Don
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