Thus began the age of computing, shaped largely by values of profit but also the beauty of mathematics. Babbage later mentored Ada Lovelace, the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat Lovelace loved the beauty of mathematics, and was enamored by Babbage’s vision, publishing the first algorithms intended to executed by such a machine. Baggage’s “Analytical Engine” promised to do the work of (human) computers much more quickly and accurately. And indeed, at the time, people were the bottleneck: if a banker wanted a list of numbers to be added, they needed to hire a computer-a person that quickly and correctly performed arithmetic-to add them. Taking arbitrary data encoded as input on punch cards, this engine would be able to quickly and automatically calculate formulas much faster than people. He called it the “Analytical Engine”, and conceived of it as a device that would encode instructions for calculations. ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations.Ĭomputing began as an idea: Charles Babbage, a mathematician, philosopher, and inventor in London in the early 19th century, began imagining a kind of mechanical machine that could automatically calculate mathematical formulas. User technology: From pointing to pondering. Files, keyboards, mice, and touchscreens-all of these concepts were invented to solve very real challenges with interacting with computers, and but for a few important people and places in the 20th century, we might have invented entirely different ways of interacting with computers 2 2 And yet, for a medium that is invented entirely from imagination, the history of user interfaces is reminder that the interactive world we experience today could have been different.

In a rapidly evolving field of augmented reality, driverless cars, and rich social media, is there any more mundane way to start a book on user interfaces than history? Probably not.

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