A History of the Interface

Before a screen, before a keyboard, before a single metaphor — a computer was wire that was either open or closed. Everything in the eighty years after this is a way of not having to look at it.

Meanwhile: there is no band yet. The Meridians are a decade away, and when they arrive they will count the night’s takings on the back of a set list and cut straight to acetate. Nothing on this page is available to them, or to almost anyone.

The ADD you wired on the last page now has a number: opcode 0010. Everyone knew a computer could run instructions like that. Grace Hopper's claim was that it could also translate — that you could write near-English and let the machine turn it into these. By her own later account she had a running compiler and nobody would touch it: she was told computers could only do arithmetic.

Meanwhile: still paper. A compiler in 1952 runs on a UNIVAC in a government lab, on a machine the size of a room. The Meridians are four years old, playing for the door, and adding the door money up in a notebook.

The band sold two records in the morning and three in the afternoon. Adding them up meant handing a deck of punched cards across a counter and waiting — minutes at a well-run computing centre, overnight at a busy one. On 9 December 1968, in San Francisco, Doug Engelbart pointed at a word on a screen and moved it instead.

Meanwhile: this is the first machine the band could plausibly have been near — and only through an accountant, on somebody else’s time. They still keep the real numbers on paper.

The day's takings are a report now. A teletype could only describe it — you typed a command, it typed back a sentence, and the page stayed invisible until it hit paper. Then the Xerox Alto arrived in 1973, and in September 1974 an editor called Bravo put the page itself on the screen.

The report became a file you could open, change and save. Every command lived in a pull-down menu — but the menu was spring-loaded: press, drag, release. Let go early and nothing happened.

Forty years in, and three from the end, the band put their numbers on a website. Before search, you found anything on it by reading link text and guessing — and frames, which kept the navigation on screen, quietly broke the one thing that made the web the web.

The Meridians split in 1999. Two years on, their whole catalogue — three tracks — fits in a pocket beside a thousand songs by people who are still going. Lists got longer than screens, and the first iPod answered with a mechanical scroll wheel that physically turned under your thumb — the click wheel is a 2004 invention — plus, in Apple's own launch words, “automatic acceleration when scrolling through long lists.”

The band has been gone twenty years when a fan posts the photograph: Al's Bar, 1968, the night they sold five records out of a suitcase. Five sales then; this will beat that before lunch. A like is the cheapest signal ever invented — one tap, nothing written, nothing risked — and it let a billion people take part in something they would otherwise only have watched. Then it started deciding what got made.

Seventy years after Grace Hopper argued you should be able to write in English, you can. So ask it who The Meridians were. Everything it can tell you is something one of the last eight machines wrote down — and the rest of them is simply gone. It is the same blank box in every product, because the product is what sits behind it.

Every date and claim in this piece, with where it came from. Anything I could not verify is marked as unverified rather than quietly smoothed over.

Three claims I could not fully verify are marked UNVERIFIED or CONTESTED below and are written that way on the pages themselves. Two errors found during this pass and corrected: the 2001 iPod had a mechanical scroll wheel, not a click wheel (2004), and Xerox PARC borrowed the phrase “what you see is what you get” rather than coining it.