The History of the Personal Computer

Before Alan got into computers, he was interested in theatre. And theatre influenced his thinking quite a lot. “I mean, theatre is actually kind of an absurd setup,” he said, “because you have a balding person in his forties impersonating a teenager in triumph, holding a plastic skull in front of some wooden scenery, right? It can’t possibly work! ... See more

So I began to think, what if the interface between the user and the computer was less literal, and more of a theatrical lie?”

“To speak to each other about this idea, my friends and I invented the term user illusion. I don’t think we ever used the term user interface , at least not in the early days. But the idea was: What can you do theatrically—be... See more

All the other tinkerers were asking themselves the same question: how to make the computer something intimate, friendly, and accessible? Also, what might people want to do with a computer if they could carry it around? The problem, as Alan put it, was that programmers at the time “lived in this tiny world, full of phrases we learned when we were ta... See more

And so one of the questions we asked ourselves was, ‘What kind of computer would it have it to be for you to want to do some grand things on it, but also mundane things, like writing a grocery list—and for the computer to be something you’d be willing to carry into a supermarket, and carry out with a couple of bags of groceries?’ Of course, you cou... See more

“The problem we quickly encountered was that in many instances, the display screen was too small to hold all the information a user might wish to consult at once. So we developed the idea of ‘windows,’ or simulated display frames within the larger physical display. Windows allowed various documents composed of text, pictures, musical notation, dyna... See more

“My friend Jerome often spoke about how we have different ways of knowing the world: one of them is kinesthetic, one of them is visual, one of them is symbolic. “That’s why,” Alan said, “we devised the concept of the mouse. We weren’t just thinking of ways of indicating things on a screen. The broader point was, how do we give the user kinesthetic ... See more