larry tesler received the chi "life time practice award" 2011. In his talk he goes from the 1960s upwards to tell his personal story of how things developed in the area of usability, interfaces, ... in labs as parc, nls, apple, ...

be aware: participatory and collaborative design existed already in the 1960s: simply take some art students and a stadium ...

in there his story about how "cut&paste" (publishing houses) became "copy & paste"; how functionality and use of the mouse changed over time. in his collaboration with a secretary he found out the following:

- character key type characters, not commands. - the intuitive use of a mouse is to point at things, not to accept and delete commands | tesler: designing for 6x10⁹, CHI2011

here's a recording of the video (missing link above?): http://dmcc.acm.org/pres/?query=/dmcc///confdata/chi2011/220-221-222/2011-05-11_09h02

and another interesting writeup of the talk: http://dux.typepad.com/dux/2011/06/inspiration-from-the-past-at-chi-2011.html

thanks for the alert!