Television is traditionally vilified as being a vacuous, flashing goggle box—"chewing gum for the eyes." However, in the twenty-first century people are much more likely to be goggling at a computer screen than a television set.
That is strange because, unlike the television, the computer did not originally include a screen. When they were first created, computers simply processed data from manually inserted punch cards. Save for some mechanical whirring, they gave no real visual clues as to what they were up to. To have even the most basic understanding of what a computer was doing at any given point in its processing, a person needed a fairly advanced degree in mathematics.
Since the invention of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), that privilege has been accessible to everyone. The man who paved the way was Douglas Engelbart (b. 1925). Inspired by an essay by Vannevar Bush that he read in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, Engelbart led the development in a pioneering new human, computer interaction system known as the "oN-Line System," or NLS. The first to employ a display screen, it used- vector graphics, clickable hypertext links, and screen-windowing, all controlled by a cursor. When demonstrated in 1968, it caused a huge sensation.
Engelbart's radical ideas were further developed by Alan Kay (b. 1940) of the Palo Alto Research Center, who introduced the idea of graphical representations of computing functions. The folders, menus, and overlapping windows with which we are all familiar today grew out of Kay's pre-eminent work. Together, they transformed how we viewed computers.
