“On January 24, 1984 the personal computing movement was changed forever with the Superbowl launch of Apple’s Macintosh computer. While the graphical user interface, mouse, and bitmapped display+printing had been around for more than a decade, the Mac represented the first combining of these key innovations into a beautifully crafted package that an ordinary consumer could pick up and use in daily life. The Mac went on to spawn several revolutions including the ‘Desktop Publishing’ phenomenon of the 80s. This site is a special project of the DigiBarn Computer Museum to bring together some of the rarest artifacts relating to the Mac (many never seen online or published in any way). We will also pull together many materials that will give you an idea of where the Mac came from, predecessor systems, people and organizations, and where the Mac fits today in our evolutionary tree of visual computing.” (DigiBarn Computer Museum)

“The fascinating history and evolution of structured flowcharts (usually called Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams or structograms) goes back to 1972. As a graduate student, I got the idea while attending an ACM organized talk in New York by Michael Jackson on structured programming. If GOTOs were to be avoided, then shouldn’t the lines in old flowcharts be avoided as well. Fifteen minutes of sketching led to the first ideas of sequence, conditionals and iteration.” (Ben Shneiderman)

The Ten Books on Architecture – ed. Morris Hicky Morgan (The Perseus Digital Library– Tufts University)

“Media affect the evolution of knowledge in society. A suitable hypertext publishing medium can speed the evolution of knowledge by aiding the expression, transmission, and evaluation of ideas. If one aims, not to compete with the popular press, but to supplement journals and conferences, then the problems of hypertext publishing seem soluble in the near term. The direct benefits of using a hypertext publishing medium should bring emergent benefits, helping to form intellectual communities, to build consensus, and to extend the range and efficiency of intellectual effort. These benefits seem numerous, deep, and substantial, but are hard to quantify. Nonetheless, rough estimates of benefits suggest that development of an adequate hypertext publishing medium should be regarded as a goal of first-rank importance.” (K. Eric Drexler – Foresight Institute)

“What is design? What makes something a design problem? It’s where you stand with a foot in two worlds – the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes and you try to bring the two together.” (Mitch Kapor 1990)

“(…) the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated (…) including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.” (Douglas Carl Engelbart – MouseSite)

Table of Contents (Harm Zwaga and Ronald Easterby eds. 1984)

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. (Vannevar Bush – The Atlantic Monthly)

Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (George A. Miller 1956)

A Unified Field Theory of Design s(Nathan Shedroff 1994)

Journey to the edge of the universe and back down to the quark (Charles and Ray Eames)

“One of the tools that shows the greatest immediate promise is the computer, when it can be harnessed for direct on-line assistance, integrated with new concepts and methods.” (Douglas Engelbart 1962 – Bootstrap Institute)

“Alan Kay is best known for the idea of personal computing (…)” (EDUCOM’98)

“(…) the slides from this landmark talk on the web.” (HT’91 Keynote – Frank Halasz / RealVideoStream)