From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Human-Computer Interaction Timeline

Karel Capek publishes R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in Prague. This play, written in Czech except for the title, introduces the word “robot” and explores the issue of whether worker-machines will replace people.

Whirlwind I begins operation. It includes the first primitive graphical display on its vectorscope screen. (See Reading 8.7.)

A. S. Douglas writes Noughts and Crosses, the first graphical computer game, on the cathode ray tube (CRT) screen of the EDSAC at Cambridge University.

British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor and team, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project, invent the first trackball, a precursor of the computer mouse. It uses a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball.

English cybernetician and psychologist Gordon Pask creates MusiColour, a computer-controlled aesthetic system that "drove an array of lights that adapted to a musician's performance" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-1980 [2008] 6). This was one of the earliest examples of "computer art."

Development begins on the SAGE Air Defense System, using a computer built by IBM after a design based on the Whirlwind. It includes the first light pen.

The full SAGE system was completed by 1963.

William Ross Ashby writes of intelligence amplification by machines in his book, Introduction to Cybernetics.

The first SAGE AN/FSQ7 is operational for the SAGE Air Defense System on a limited basis.

The system allowed online access, in graphical form, to data transmitted to and processed by its computers. Fully deployed by 1963, the IBM-built early warning system remained operational until 1984. With 23 direction centers situated on the northern, eastern, and western boundaries of the United States, SAGE pioneered the use of computer control over large, geographically distributed systems.

Wesley A. Clark designs and builds the TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. It had 320 kilobytes of fast memory, about twice the capacity of the biggest commercial machines. Other features were magnetic tape storage, an on-line typewriter, the first Xerox printer, paper tape for program input, and a nine inch CRT screen. Among its applications were development of interactive graphics and research on human-computer interaction.

"Somewhat the same problem arises in communicating with a machine entity that would arise in communicating with a person of an entirely different language background than your own. A system of logical definition and translation would have to be available. In order that meanings should not be lost, such a system of translation would also need to be precise. We are all familiar with the unhappy results of language translations which are either lacking in precision or where suitable words of equivalent meaning cannot be found. Likewise, translating into a machine language cannot be anything but an exact operation. Machines even more than people must be addressed with clarity and unambiguity, for machines cannot improvise on their own or imagine that about which they have not been specifically informed, as a human might do within reasonable limits of error. . . .

"We must now ascertain how concepts are formulated within the framework of computer language. For analogy, let us first consider the manner in which instructions are usually given to a non-mechanical entity. When we instruct, for example, a human being, we are aided by the fact that the human is usually able to fill in gaps in our instructions through acumen acquired from his own past experiences. It is seldom necessary that instructions be either detailed or literal, although we may have lost sight of this fact.

"The computer in a correlate example is a mechanical 'being' which must be instructed at each and every step. But it can be given a very long list of instructions upon which it can be expected to subsequently act with great speed and accuracy and with untiring repetition. Machine traits are: low comprehension, high retention, extreme reliability, and tremendous speed. The use of superlatives here to describe these traits is not exaggerative. Since speed becomes in practice the equivalent of number, the machine might be, and has sometimes been, equated to legions — an army, if you will — of lowgrade morons whose conceptualization is entirely literal, who remember as long as is necessary or as you desire them to, whose loyalty and subservience is complete, who require no holidays, no spurious incentives, no morale programs, pensions, not even gratitude for past service, and who seemingly never tire of doing elementary repetitive tasks such as typing, accounting, bookkeeping, arithmetic, filling in forms, and the like. In about all these respects the machine may be seen to be the exact opposite of nature's loftiest creature, the intellligent human being, who becomes bored with the petty and repetitious, who is unreliable, who wanders from the task for the most trivial reasons, who gets out of humor, who forgets, who requires constant incentives and rewards, who improvises on his own even when to do so is impertinent to the objectives being undertaken, and who in summary (let's face it) is unsuitable to most forms of industry as the latter are ideally and practically conceived in our times. It becomes apparent in retrospect that the only excuse we might ever have had for employing him to do many of civilization's more literal and repetitious tasks was the absence of something more efficient with which to replace him!

"It is not the purpose of this volume to explore further the ramifications of the above statements of fact. . . ."(Nett & Hetzler, An Introduction to Electronic Data Processing [1959] 86-88).

At the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) demonstrates the prototype of its first computer, the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1), designed by a team headed by Ben Gurley.

"The launch of the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) computer in 1959 marked a radical shift in the philosophy of computer design: it was the first commercial computer that focused on interaction with the user rather than the efficient use of computer cycles" (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/decpdp-1/, accessed 06-25-2009).

Selling for $120,000, the PDP-1 was a commercialization of the TX-O and TX-2 computers designed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. On advice from the venture-capital firm that financed the company, DEC did not call it a “computer,” but instead called the machine a “programmed data processor.” The PDP-1 was credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references identified this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC gave that designation to either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965.

Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/Digital/timeline/1959-2.htm, accessed 08-25-2009.

PLATO I (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), the first electronic learning system, developed by Donald Bitzer, operates on the ILLIAC 1 at the University of Illinois.

Plato I included a television for a display and a special system to navigate the system's menu. It serviced a single user. In 1961 PLATO II allowed two students to operate the system at one time.

J. C. R. Licklider publishes Man-Computer Symbiosis, postulating that the computer should become an intimate symbiotic partner in human activity, including communication. (See Reading 10.5.)

J.C.R. Licklider and Welden E. Clark publish “Online Man-Computer Communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, for graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.)

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute completes his report, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, for the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, creates the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. (See Reading 10.7.)

J.C.R. Licklider sends a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly calls the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent.” (Waldrop)

Computer scientist Lawrence G. Roberts publishes Machine Perception of Three Dimensional Solids, MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report, TR 315, May 1963. This contained "the first algorithm to eliminate hidden or obscured surfaces from a perspective picture" (Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, accessed 05-30-2009).

In 1965, Roberts implemented a homogeneous coordinate scheme for transformations and perspective,  publishing Homogenous Matrix Representation and Manipulation of N-Dimensional Constructs, MIT MS-1505. Roberts's "solutions to these problems prompted attempts over the next decade to find faster algorithms for generating hidden surfaces" (Carlson, op. cit.).

Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invent the first plasma video display for the PLATO Computer System.

The display was monochrome neon orange and incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics. Built by Owens-Illinois glass, the flat panels were marketed under the name "Digivue."

Woodbrow W. "Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database. Bledsoe (1966a) described the following difficulties:

" 'This recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head rotation and tilt, lighting intensity and angle, facial expression, aging, etc. Some other attempts at facial recognition by machine have allowed for little or no variability in these quantities. Yet the method of correlation (or pattern matching) of unprocessed optical data, which is often used by some researchers, is certain to fail in cases where the variability is great. In particular, the correlation is very low between two pictures of the same person with two different head rotations.'

"This project was labeled man-machine because the human extracted the coordinates of a set of features from the photographs, which were then used by the computer for recognition. Using a GRAFACON, or RAND TABLET, the operator would extract the coordinates of features such as the center of pupils, the inside corner of eyes, the outside corner of eyes, point of widows peak, and so on. From these coordinates, a list of 20 distances, such as width of mouth and width of eyes, pupil to pupil, were computed. These operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. When building the database, the name of the person in the photograph was associated with the list of computed distances and stored in the computer. In the recognition phase, the set of distances was compared with the corresponding distance for each photograph, yielding a distance between the photograph and the database record. The closest records are returned.

"This brief description is an oversimplification that fails in general because it is unlikely that any two pictures would match in head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale (distance from the camera). Thus, each set of distances is normalized to represent the face in a frontal orientation. To accomplish this normalization, the program first tries to determine the tilt, the lean, and the rotation. Then, using these angles, the computer undoes the effect of these transformations on the computed distances. To compute these angles, the computer must know the three-dimensional geometry of the head. Because the actual heads were unavailable, Bledsoe (1964) used a standard head derived from measurements on seven heads.

"After Bledsoe left PRI [Panoramic Research, Inc.] in 1966, this work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily by Peter Hart. In experiments performed on a database of over 2000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks (Bledsoe 1968). Peter Hart (1996) enthusiastically recalled the project with the exclamation, 'It really worked!' " (Faculty Council, University of Texas at Austin, In Memoriam Woodrow W. Bledsoe, accessed 05-15-2009).

Bledsoe, W. W. 1964. The Model Method in Facial Recognition, Technical Report PRI 15, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W., and Chan, H. 1965. A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System-Some Preliminary Results, Technical Report PRI 19A, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966a. Man-Machine Facial Recognition: Report on a Large-Scale Experiment, Technical Report PRI 22, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966b. Some Results on Multicategory Patten Recognition. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13(2):304-316.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1968. Semiautomatic Facial Recognition, Technical Report SRI Project 6693, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California.

M. R. Davis and T. O. Ellis of The Rand Corporation publish The RAND Tablet: A Machine Graphical Communication Device. They indicate that the device had been in use since 1963.

"The RAND table is believed to be the first such graphic device that is digital, is relatively low-cost, possesses excellent linearity, and is able to uniquely describe 10 [to the 6th power] locations in the 10" x 10" active table area. . . . the tablet has great potential no only in such applications as digitizing map information, but also as a working tool in the study of more esoteric applications of graphical languages for man-machine interaction. . . . " (p.iv)

"The RAND tablet device generates 10-bit x and 10-bit y stylus position information. It is connected to an input channel of a general-purpose computer and also to an oscilloscope display. The display control multiplexes the stylus position information with computer-generated information in such a way that the oscilloscope display contains a composite of the current pen position (represented as a dot) and the computer output. In addition, the computer may regenerate meaningful track history on the CRT, so that while the user is writing, it appears that the pen has "ink." This displayed "ink" is visualized from the oscilloscope display while hand-directing the stylus position on the tablet. users normally adjust within a few minutes to the conceptual superposition of the displayed ink and the actual off-screen pen movement. There is no apparent loss of ease or speed in writing, printing, constructing arbitrary figures, or even in penning one's signature" (pp. 2-3).

J. W. Ward, History of Pen Computing: Annotated Bibliography in On-line Character Recognition and Pen Computing: http://rwservices.no-ip.info:81/pens/biblio70.html#DavisMR64 , accessed 12-30-2009).

J.C.R. Licklider publishes Libraries of the Future, a study of what libraries may be at the end of the twentieth century.

Licklider's book reviewed systems for information storage, organization, and retrieval, use of computers in libraries, and library question-answering systems.

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson coins the terms “hypertext” and “hyperlink” to refer to features of a computerized information system.

Using the Project MAC, an early time-sharing system at MIT, Cyrus Levinthal builds the first system for the interactive display of molecular structures. 

"This program allowed the study of short-range interaction between atoms and the "online manipulation" of molecular structures. The display terminal (nicknamed Kluge) was a monochrome oscilloscope (figures 1 and 2), showing the structures in wireframe fashion (figures 3 and 4). Three-dimensional effect was achieved by having the structure rotate constantly on the screen. To compensate for any ambiguity as to the actual sense of the rotation, the rate of rotation could be controlled by globe-shaped device on which the user rested his/her hand (an ancestor of today's trackball). Technical details of this system were published in 1968 (Levinthal et al.). What could be the full potential of such a set-up was not completely settled at the time, but there was no doubt that it was paving the way for the future. Thus, this is the conclusion of Cyrus Levinthal's description of the system in Scientific American (p. 52):

It is too early to evaluate the usefulness of the man-computer combination in solving real problems of molecular biology. It does seems likely, however, that only with this combination can the investigator use his "chemical insight" in an effective way. We already know that we can use the computer to build and display models of large molecules and that this procedure can be very useful in helping us to understand how such molecules function. But it may still be a few years before we have learned just how useful it is for the investigator to be able to interact with the computer while the molecular model is being constructed.

"Shortly before his death in 1990, Cyrus Levinthal penned a short biographical account of his early work in molecular graphics. The text of this account can be found here."

You can watch a six minute film produced with the interactive molecular graphics and modeling system devised by Cyrus Levinthal and his collaborators in the mid-1960s at this link.

Professor of mechanical engineering and researcher in interactive computer graphics at MIT's Electronic Systems Laboratory Steven A. Coons publishes Surfaces for Computer-aided Design of Space Forms, Project MAC Report MAC-TR-41, MIT.

Known as the "The Little Red Book,

" the paper described what became known as the "Coons Patch"— "a formulation that presented the notation, mathematical foundation, and intuitive interpretation of an idea that would ultimately become the foundation for surface descriptions that are commonly used today, such as b-spline surfaces, NURB surfaces, etc. His technique for describing a surface was to construct it out of collections of adjacent patches, which had continuity constraints that would allow surfaces to have curvature which was expected by the designer. Each patch was defined by four boundary curves, and a set of "blending functions" that defined how the interior was constructed out of interpolated values of the boundaries" (Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, accessed 05-30-2009).

Douglas C. Engelbart files a patent for an X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. This device will become known as The Mouse.

Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, creates the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) head mounted display system.

Sutherland's head mounted display was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the formidable appearance of the device inspired its name—the Sword of Damocles. The system was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe rooms.

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by American film director Stanley Kubrick in collaboration with science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, captures imaginations with the idea of a computer that can see, speak, hear, and “think.” 

Perhaps the star of the film was the HAL 9000 computer. "HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery. HAL is usually represented only as his television camera "eyes" that can be seen throughout the Discovery spaceship. . . . HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition, facial recognition, and natural language processing, but also lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotions, expressing emotions, reasoning, and chess, in addition to maintaining all systems on an interplanetary voyage.

"HAL is never visualized as a single entity. He is, however, portrayed with a soft voice and a conversational manner. This is in contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film" (Wikipedia article on HAL 9000, accessed 05-24-2009).

"Kubrick and Clarke had met in New York City in 1964 to discuss the possibility of a collaborative film project. As the idea developed, it was decided that the story for the film was to be loosely based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an entry in a BBC short story competition. Originally, Clarke was going to write the screenplay for the film, but Kubrick suggested during one of their brainstorming meetings that before beginning on the actual script, they should let their imaginations soar free by writing a novel first, which the film would be based on upon its completion. 'This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end, novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions. Thus I rewrote some sections after seeing the movie rushes -- a rather expensive method of literary creation, which few other authors can have enjoyed.' The novel ended up being published a few months after the release of the movie" (Wikipedia article on Arthur C. Clarke, accessed 05-24-2009).

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute demonstrates at the San Francisco Convention Center an “oNLine System” (NLS), the features of which include hypertext, text editing, screen windowing, and email. To make this system operate, Engelbart uses the mouse which he had invented the previous year.

Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

PARC became the incubator of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), and Ethernet.

Architect and computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte of MIT publishes The Architecture Machine.

Negroponte's pioneering and forward-looking book described early research on computer-aided design, and in so doing covered early work on human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and computer graphics. It contained a large number of illustrations.

"Most of the machines that I will be discussing do not exist at this time. The chapters are primarily extrapolations into the future derived from experiences with various computer-aided design systems. . . .

"There are three possible ways in which machines can assist the design process: (1) current procedures can be automated, thus speeding up and reducing the cost of existing practices; (2) existing methods can be altered to fit within the specifications and constitution of a machine, where only those issues are considered that are supposedly machine-compatible; (3) the design process, considered as evolutionary, can be presented to a machine, also considered as evolutionary, and a mutal training, resilience, and growth can be developed" (From Negroponte's "Preface to a Preface," p. [6]).

This book has been called the first book on the personal computer. On that I do not agree. The book contains only vague discussions of the possiblity of eventual personal computers. Most specifically it says, as caption to its second illustration, a cartoon relating to a home computer, "The computer at home is not a fanciful concept. As the cost of computation lowers, the computer utility will become a consumer item, and every child should have one." Instead The Architecture Machine may be the first book on human-computer interaction, and on the possibilities of computer-aided design.

One of the first touchscreens in a working computer application was in the terminal of the Plato IV system at the University of Illinois.

"In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer's orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512x512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen" (Wikipedia article on Plato (computer system), accessed 12-30-2009).

The Alto computer system is operational at Xerox PARC.

Conceptually the first personal computer system, the Alto eventually featured the first WYSYWG (What You See is What You Get) editor, a graphic user interface (GUI), networking through Ethernet, and a mouse. When offered for sale the system was priced $32,000.

Ted Nelson self-publishes the book, Computer Lib, sub-titled You can and must understand computers NOW. Nelson issued this together with: Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report. In his book Tools for Thought: The History and Future  of Mind-Expanding Technology Howard Rheingold called Computer Lib "the best-selling underground manifesto of the microcomputer revolution."

in 1987 Nelson's book was reissued by Microsoft Press with an introduction by Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Both the 1974 and 1987 editions have a highly unconventional layout, with two front covers (one for Computer Lib and the other for Dream Machines) and the division between the two books marked by text (for the other side) rotated 180°. The text itself is broken up into many sections, with simulated pull-quotes, comics, side bars, etc., similar to a magazine layout.

At Evans & Sutherland John Warnock and John Gaffney develop the "The Evans and Sutherland Design System" for producing 3-dimensional graphical databases both for the Evans & Sutherland CAD/CAM Picture System and for custom-built simulation machines. 

These graphics systems used a graphics model, developed by Ivan Sutherland and others, based on coordinate system transformations and line drawing.

"John Warnock joined Xerox PARC in 1978 to work for Charles "Chuck" Geschke. There he teamed up with Martin Newell in producing an interpreted graphics system called JAM. "JAM" stands for "John And Martin". JAM had the same postfix execution semantics as Gaffney's Design System, and was based on the Evans and Sutherland imaging model, but augmented the E&S imaging model by providing a much more extensive set of graphics primitives. Like the later versions of the Design System, JAM was "token based" rather than "command line based", which means that the JAM interpreter reads a stream of input tokens and processes each token completely before moving to the next. Newell and Warnock implemented JAM on various Xerox workstations; by 1981 JAM was available at Stanford on the Xerox Alto computers, where I first saw it.  

"In the meantime, various people at Xerox were building a series of experimental raster printers. The first of these was called XGP, the Xerox Graphics Printer, and had a resolution of 192 dots to the inch. Xerox made XGP's available to certain universities, and by 1972 they were in use at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and the University of Toronto. Each of those organizations produced its own hardware and software interfaces. The XGP is historically interesting only because it is the first raster printer to gain substantial use by computer scientists, and was the arena in which a lot of mistakes were made and a lot of lessons learned.  

"To replace the XGP, Xerox PARC developed a new printer called EARS, and then another newer printer called Dover. After the agony of converting software from XGP to EARS, various Xerox people realized that applications programs generating files for the XGP or for EARS should not be tied to the device properties of the printer itself. Bob Sproull and William Newman, of Xerox PARC, developed a relatively device-independent page image description scheme, called "Press format", which was used to instruct raster printers what to print.  

"As part of an extensive grant program to selected universities, Xerox donated Dover printers and made documentation of the Press format available under a nondisclosure agreement. As far as I know, that nondisclosure agreement has never been lifted, though information about Press format has been widely enough distributed that by 1982 researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) at Lausanne had given conference papers about their own independent implementation of Press format.  

"Press format was a smashing success; it revolutionized laser printing technology in the academic and research communities, and stimulated a large number of people to think about issues of device-independent print graphics. Nevertheless, Press format had its limitations, and various people felt the need to revise the basic design.  

"Sproull left Xerox in 1978 to become a professor of computer science at CMU. Newman returned home to England to become an independent consultant. Martin Newell left Xerox to join Cadlinc Corp. Warnock and Geschke remained at Xerox.  

"While at CMU, Sproull began making plans for a new version of Press that would combine the graphics model of JAM with the page image description properties of Press. Sproull returned to Xerox for a sabbatical leave in 1982, and enlisted the help of Butler Lampson in the creation of the new page image description language that Warnock dubbed "Interpress". The name caught on.  

"While it is difficult to separate the contributions made by Sproull and Lampson, it is not incorrect to say that Lampson and Warnock produced the execution model of Interpress while Sproull and Warnock produced the imaging model. It is also approximately correct to characterize this first version of Interpress as being derived from the graphics model and execution model of JAM with additional protection and security mechanisms derived from experience with programming languages like Euclid and Cedar, and a careful silence on the issue of fonts. The trio worked under Geschke's direction, and Geschke was responsible for refereeing disagreements and for making certain that the resulting design was acceptable to the rest of Xerox" (Brian Reid, http://groups.google.com/group/fa.laser-lovers/msg/5d0df32a0e91f1fa?rnum=2&pli=1, accessed 01-07-2009).

Funded by ARPA, The Aspen Movie Map, an early hypermedia project produced at the Architecture Machine Group (ARC MAC) at MIT under the direction of Andrew Lippman, allows the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado.

"ARPA funding during the late 1970s was subject to the military application requirements of the notorious Mansfield Amendment introduced by Mike Mansfield (which had severely limited funding for hypertext researchers like Douglas Engelbart).

"The Aspen Movie Map's military application was to solve the problem of quickly familiarizing soldiers with new territory. The Department of Defense had been deeply impressed by the success of Operation Entebbe in 1976, where the Israeli commandos had quickly built a crude replica of the airport and practiced in it before attacking the real thing. DOD hoped that the Movie Map would show the way to a future where computers could instantly create a three-dimensional simulation of a hostile environment at much lower cost and in less time (see virtual reality).

"While the Movie Map has been referred to as an early example of interactive video, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a pioneering example of interactive computing. Video, audio, still images, and metadata were retrieved from a database and assembled on the fly by the computer (an Interdata minicomputer running the MagicSix operating system) redirecting its actions based upon user input; video was the principle, but not sole affordance of the interaction" (Wikipedia article on Aspen Movie Map, accessed 04-16-2009).

Xerox introduces the 8010 Star Information System, the first commercial system to incorporate a bitmapped display, a windows-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, printer servers and e-mail.

The science fiction film Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford and directed by Ridley Scott, loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, depicts a dreary, rainy, and polluted Los Angeles in 2019. In the film genetically manufactured, bioengineered biorobots called replicants—visually indistinguishable from adult humans—are used for dangerous and degrading work in Earth's "off-world colonies."  After a minor replicant uprising, replicants are banned on Earth; and specialist police units called "blade runners" are trained to hunt down and "retire" (kill) escaped replicants on Earth.

The film, which  became a cult classic for many reasons, including its unique sets, lighting, costumes and visual effects, is considered the last great science fiction film in which the special effects were produced entirely through analog, rather than digital or computer graphics methods, using elaborate model-making, multiple exposures, etc.

Scott's original director's cut of the film was first issued as a DVD in 1999. In 2007 the so-called "Final Cut" with a great deal of supplementary material, including three previous versions of the film, and a "definitive" documentary, even longer than the original film, was issued on DVD, HD-DVD and Blue-ray. The documentary, and the collection of versions of the film, present a superb opportunity to gain insight into way that Ridley Scott creates a film.

Microsoft introduces Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS.

This was the first word processor to make extensive use of the computer mouse.

Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-150, one of the earliest commercially available touchscreen computers.

"The screen is not a touch screen in the strict sense, but a 9" Sony CRT surrounded by infrared emitters and detectors which detect the position of any non-transparent object on the screen. In the original HP-150, these emitters & detectors were placed within small holes located in the inside of the monitor's bezel (which resulted in the bottom series of holes sometimes filling with dust and causing the touch screen to fail; until the dust was vacuumed from the holes)" (Wikipedia article on HP-150, accessed 12-30-2009).

Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh ("Mac"), with a graphical user interface based on the Xerox Star system.

"In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.  

"It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books 57 February 11, 2010.

Microsoft introduces Windows 1.0 for the PC.

Windows 1.0 was a graphical user interface (GUI) multi-tasking operating environment extension of MS-DOS rather than a completely new operating system.

GRiD Systems, a subsidiary of Tandy Corporation, introduces the first commercially available tablet computer: the GRiDPad, which uses an operating system based on MS-DOS.

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter J. Deutsch, students at McGill University, write ARCHIE, a program designed to index FTP archives.

ARCHIE was the first “search engine,” as distinct from a “web search engine.”

Psychologist, neural scientist and cognitive scientist James A. Anderson publishes "The BSB Model: A simple non-linear autoassociative network," M. Hassoun (Ed), Associative Neural Memories: Theory and Implementation (1993).

Anderson's neural networks have been applied to models of human concept formation, decision making, speech perception, and models of vision.

Anderson, J. A., Spoehr, K. T. and Bennett, D.J.  "A study in numerical perversity: Teaching arithmetic to a neural network,"  D.S. Levine and M. Aparicio (Eds.) Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Inference, (1994).

Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge calls the creation of the first ultraintelligent machine the Singularity in Omni magazine.

Vinge's follow-up paper entitled "What is the Singularity?" presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993, and  slightly changed in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review, contains the oft-quoted statement,

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

"Vinge refines his estimate of the time scales involved, adding, 'I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.

"Vinge continues by predicting that superhuman intelligences, however created, will be able to enhance their own minds faster than the humans that created them. 'When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress," Vinge writes, "that progress will be much more rapid.' This feedback loop of self-improving intelligence, he predicts, will cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period of time" (Wikipedia article on Technological singularity, accessed 05-24-2009).

Gary Kasparov, sometimes regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, resigns 19 moves into Game 6 against Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per second.

This was the first time that a human world chess champion lost to a computer under tournament conditions.

The event was broadcast live from IBM's website via a Java viewer, and became the world's record "Net event" at the time.

"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:  

" 'By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.'

"It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books, 57, February 11, 2010).

American director, screen writer and film producer Steven Spielberg directs, co-authors and produces the science fiction film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, telling the story of David, an android robot child programmed with the ability to love and to dream. The film explores the hopes and fears involved with efforts to simulate human thought processes, and the social consequences of creating robots that may be better than people at specialized tasks.

The film was a 1970s project of Stanley Kubrick, who eventually turned it over to Spielberg. The project languished in development hell for nearly three decades before technology advanced sufficiently for a successful production. The film required enormously complex puppetry, computer graphics, and make-up prosthetics, which are well-described and explained in the supplementary material in the two-disc special edition of the film issued on DVD in 2002.

Steven Spielberg directs the science fiction film Minority Report, loosely based on the short story, "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick.

"It is set primarily in Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia in the year 2054, where "Precrime", a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called 'precogs'. The cast includes Tom Cruise as Precrime officer John Anderton, Colin Farrell as Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer, Samantha Morton as the senior precog Agatha, and Max von Sydow as Anderton's superior Lamar Burgess. The film has a distinctive look, featuring desaturated colors that make it almost resemble a black-and-white film, yet the blacks and shadows have a high contrast, resembling film noir."

"Some of the technologies depicted in the film were later developed in the real world – for example, multi-touch interfaces are similar to the glove-controlled interface used by Anderton. Conversely, while arguing against the lack of physical contact in touch screen phones, PC Magazine's Sascha Segan argued in February 2009, 'This is one of the reasons why we don't yet have the famous Minority Report information interface. In that movie, Tom Cruise donned special gloves to interact with an awesome PC interface where you literally grab windows and toss them around the screen. But that interface is impractical without the proper feedback—without actually being able to feel where the edges of the windows are' " (Wikipedia article on Minority Report [film] accessed 05-25-2009).

The two-disc special edition of the film issued on DVD in 2002 contains excellent supplementary material on the special digital effects.

Linden Lab makes publicly available the privately owned, partly subscription-based, virtual world, Second Life.

"With the vision of connecting people to information that makes a difference in their lives," Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman found Kosmix.com.

Intellectual historian Anthony Grafton publishes "Future Reading. Digitization and its Discontents" in The New Yorker Magazine. This was revised and reissued as a small book entitled Codex in Crisis (2008). It was reprinted as the last chapter in Grafton's, Worlds Made by Words. Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (2009).

On December 18, 2008 Grafton spoke about Codex in Crisis at Google in the Authors@Google series. A video of this presentation is available on YouTube at http://www.google.com/cse?cx=002920929640144004653%3A7yibd0sz9ny&ie=UTF-8&q=codex+in+crisis&x=48&y=9.