Introduction to HCI Paradigms

HCI Paradigms 1. Time sharing In the 1940s and 1950s, the significant advances in computing consisted of new hardware technologies. Mechanical relays were replaced by vacuum electron tubes. Tubes were replaced by transistors, and transistors by integrated chips, all of which meant that the amount of sheer computing power was increasing by orders of magnitude. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that the explosion of growth in computing power would be wasted if there were not an equivalent explosion of ideas about how to channel that power. 2. Video display units As early as the mid-1950s researchers were experimenting with the possibility of presenting and manipulating information from a computer in the form of images on a video display unit (VDU). These display screens could provide a more suitable medium than a paper printout for presenting vast quantities of strategic information for rapid assimilation. It was not until 1962, however, when a young graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ivan Sutherland, astonished the established computer science community with the Sketchpad program, that the capabilities of visual images were realized