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You might be interested in Brad Myers' new book "Pick, Click, Flick! The Story of Interaction Techniques". He's a prominent researcher in HCI at Carnegie Mellon University (and one of my colleagues). It gives a great overview of the history of how we interact with computers. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/ixtbook/ Here's a summary of the book:
This book provides a comprehensive study of the many ways to interact with computers and computerized devices. An “interaction technique” starts when the user performs an action that causes an electronic device to respond, and includes the direct feedback from the device to the user. Examples include physical buttons and switches, on-screen menus and scrollbars operated by a mouse, touchscreen widgets and gestures such as flick-to-scroll, text entry on computers and touchscreens, consumer electronic controls such as remote controls, game controllers, input for virtual reality systems like waving a Nintendo Wii wand or your hands in front of a Microsoft Kinect, interactions with conversational agents such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Microsoft Cortana, and adaptations of all of these for people with disabilities. The book starts with a history of the invention and development of these techniques, discusses the various options used today, and continues on to the future with the latest research on interaction techniques such as presented at academic conferences. It features summaries of interviews with the original inventors of some interaction techniques such as Larry Tesler (copy-and-paste), David Canfield Smith (the desktop and icons), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets), Loren Brichter (Pull-to-Refresh), Bill Atkinson (Menu Bar and HyperCard), Ted Selker (IBM TrackPoint pointing stick), and many others. Sections also cover how to use, model, implement, and evaluate new interaction techniques. The goal of the book is to be useful for anyone interested in why we interact with electronic devices the way we do, to designers creating the interaction techniques of tomorrow who need to know the options and constraints and what has been tried, and even for implementers and consumers who want to get the most out of their interaction techniques. |