A Missing Generation: Office Automation/Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction

摘要

Office Automation or Office Information Systems was a field of HCl research that flourished for a decade and then disappeared. It attracted leading researchers and established valuable new directions, but much of its record is scattered or absent online. This is a brief account of that activity. Advances in hardware have produced a new platform about every decade, each about two orders of magnitude smaller (Figure 1). Scientific computing based on vacuum-tube computers gave way to business computing (or "administrative data processing") on mainframes. Then came minicomputers, followed by microprocessor-based personal computers and workstations. Handheld computers such as the Palm Pilot appeared in the mid-1990s and are beginning to flourish as smart phones. And now computation is everywhere—few children's toys do not have a chip lurking within.