The computer industry has experienced rapid technical growth in the past. Computer performance, in terms of operations per dollar, has improved between 1950 and 1962 at a rate of more than 80 percent per year.* During this period it has been found that the power of a computer is approximately proportional to the square of its cost; a computer costing ten times as much as another will be 100 times more powerful and will process a unit of throughput at 1/10 the cost of the cheaper machine.**

*KE Knight, compared 225 general purpose computer systems manufactured between 1944 and 1963. His findings were that computer performance, in terms of operations per dollar, had improved between 1950 and 1962 at an average rate of 81 percent per year for scientific computation and 87 percent for commercial computation? | Changes in computer performance, Datamation Vol 12 No 9 pp 40-54 1966 (via rd jones, acm national meeting 1967

or - who earns the booby prize in user orientation|design in 1976? to cut the story short: light pen and stylus tablet. anyhow this article holds much more to it that makes it a nice read.

Dynamic Hieroglyphs Lest you get the impression that I am surer than I am about the importance of making the situation as simple for users as is consistent with the task to be facilitated, let me mention an idea at the other end of the complexity scale that nevertheless appeals to me greatly.

It starts out with the observation that, although alphabetic (or alphanumeric) languages with fewer than a hundred printing characters appear to have won out in the modern western world, there is something to be said for very much larger "character sets". In general, the more characters or other elementary signs, the shorter the representation of an idea. Chinese uses much less space per idea than English, which -- with its larger vocabulary of words - is more compact than the other alphabetic languages.

Mathematicians are always running out of Latin characters and adding Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and German Script to their repertoire. Now that we have the computer to serve as vocabulary drill master and quickly give us very large vocabularies, why not go back to hieroglyphs and work with an ensemble of several thousand, rather than only several dozen, basic signs?

Why not, indeed, let the basic signs be kinematic? Each "dynamic hieroglyph" could then truly "tell a story". | j.c.r. licklider, user oriented interactive computer graphics, acm chi conference, 1976

licklider also recalls sutherland's "retinal projection system": tracking a target without involving the hands:

In Ivan's laboratory at Harvard, I had the experience of walking around in a model-perceptual room (inside the larger real laboratory room), a room made out of lines, as in a mechanical engineering drawing. Later, in his laboratory at Utah, I had the dubious pleasure of visually steering a missile from a point in space from which I could see most of North America toward an intended point of impact, the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

I was in the nose of the missile, and the missile went where I looked. For- tunately, I blinked just before impact, and the missile hit about half-way to Catalina Island. Rand is still in operation. But I retain some very vivid imagery, together with the conviction that an important part of user orienta- tion involves taking advantage of the user's best built-in or already mastered skills -- such as tracking a target by eye without involving the hands.

Sutherland, I. "A Head-Mounted Three- Dimensional Display", Proc. Fall Joint Computer Conf., 1968.

licklider goes on describing an early eye tracking device and one might add: the glory days of NASA

A few years ago, NASA developed an eye-tracking device that observed a human eye from a distance and figured out the direction the eye was looking. Marvin Minsky borrowed the device, and one of his students, Sam Geffner, programmed a demonstration that embodies another neat bit of user orientation [2].

What does a person who is reading a foreign language do when he encounters a word he cannot translate? He pauses, and so do his eyes. The computer displayed sentences of French in letters large enough to permit the NASA device (with the aid of some calculation) to determine where, in the text, each eye fixation fell. Whenever the fixation point lingered too long in the vicinity of a word or phrase, the computer substituted the (pretranslated) English equivalent for the French word or phrase.

The demonstration was just a concept feasibility demonstration-- the viewer's head was clamped in a jig-- but the idea impressed me strongly. The essential point, of course, is to let the computer know what the user is doing so it can help him. I wonder whether a clue to or harbinger of the condition, "I don't know the translation", can be derived from EEG waves. Of course, I personally would be willing to press a button.

[2]. Geffner, S.L. An Eye Trackinq Program, M.S. Thesis, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jam(sic?¿). 1968.

and for sure he mentions the light pens and "stylus tablets" which are

... two devices that seem to me to tie for the booby prize in user orientation ...

he gives credit to mort bernstein and lou gallenson for putting the display screen down on the desk, yet there is one more interesting aspect: chip design

Graphics has dominated most of the computer systems (such as systems for computer aided design and systems for the layout of LSI chips) that have made extensive use of interactive graphics ... | j.c.r. licklider, user oriented interactive computer graphics, acm chi conference, 1976

thus, the tablet has great potential not only in such applications as digitizing map informtion, but also as a working tool in the study of more esoteric applications of graphical languages for man-machine interaction.| m.r. davis and t.o. ellis