1960
In the 1960s, Dartmouth’s BASIC programming language [7] It was designed and implemented at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Over time, BASIC became a popular language for home users and, for business use, it introduced many people to programming as a hobby or career. Many of the modern concepts of computer graphics, dynamic objects, and object-oriented programming were prototyped by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 on Sketchpad. [13][14]. In the mid-1960s, Seymour Papert, a mathematician who had been working with Piaget in Geneva, came to the United States, where he co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky. Papert worked with the team of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, led by Wallace Feurzeig who created the first version of Logo. [25] in 1967. In the late sixties Alan Kay [2][3][17] He used the term ‘personal computer’ and created a concept prototype, the FLEX machine, he also envisioned a ‘Dynabook’ machine, the sketches for this look very similar to laptops of recent years. Simulates it [28] The language was developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard and this included object-oriented concepts. Douglas Engelbert’s worked on a project to augment the human intellect, as part of Augment [8] hypertext and videoconference demonstration project.
1970
Alan Kay joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) [17][19] California in 1971. Throughout the 1970s, the PARC group led by Dr. Kay developed an integrated programming language and programming environment called Smalltalk. [10]. At the beginning of the seventies, the Alto personal computer was created at PARC. El Alto finally introduced the world’s first WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor, a commercial mouse for input, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a bitmap display, and menus and icons offered. and linked to a local area network. Alto provided the foundation for the Xerox STAR 8010 information system. There was still a need to find a common use for a personal computer that would increase its demand. In 1978, Harvard Business School student Daniel Bricklin came up with the idea for an interactive visible calculator. Bricklin and Bob Frankston later co-invented the VisiCalc software program [1]. VisiCalc was a spreadsheet and the first “killer” application for personal computers, as this application provided a justification for using personal computers as a productive tool.
1980s
During the 1980s, personal computer ownership became increasingly popular and many home users programmed using BASIC. In the early eighties, IBM developed the first personal computer built from standard parts (called open architecture) [15]. This included a command line operating system written by Microsoft and the Microsoft BASIC programming language. Apple further developed the GUI for Lisa [5] which later became Macintosh (Mac). The IBM-style PC became more popular for business applications, while Apple’s Mac was often used for desktop publishing.
1990s
Research on end-user programming has continued to this day. Research has continued in Visual Programming techniques. [9] for example, Alice [4], Programming for example [2][21], automated assistance programming [20]and natural language programming [27]. Screech and croquet[6] they have been developed from the initial work on Smalltalk.
Tim Berners-Lee [23] developed HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and has been involved with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [29] in the development of standards base languages for the Web. This has fostered the growth of the ‘Semantic Web’ [11] allowing both humans and computers to find and interact more with pages and thus fostered the development of interactive web pages and communities.
2000
Recent, present and future research may allow the use of semantic web technologies (developed from HTML by Tim Berners-Lee [23] and others), to enable end-user programming. This fusion of research and technology is illustrated on Henry Lieberman’s home page. [12] which has explanations of both research areas. Examples of this fusion include Protected [22], Jena [16], Composer for TopBraid [24]and OpenCyc [18]. Information on these technologies is available on my semantic website: http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm. A related development is that of web 2.0. Visual development environments based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) [26] They are intended to reproduce on the web, the functionality provided by office tools such as Excel (which is often used as an end-user programming environment). Information on Ajax and Web 2.0 is available on my Ajax / web2.0 page: http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htm.
References
1. A Brief History of Spreadsheets – http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html – Decision Support System Resources – by DJ Power, editor of DSSResources.COM.
2. Alan Kay – http://www.acypher.com/wwid/FrontMatter/index.html – Watch what I do – Programming by example.
3. Alan Kay ETech 2003 presentation – http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html – Tour by Lisa Rein for Alan Kay’s Etech 2003 presentation.
4. Alice v2.0 – http://www.alice.org/ – Learn to program interactive 3D graphics.
5. Apple Lisa – http://fp3.antelecom.net/gcifu/applemuseum/lisa2.html – The first affordable GUI – Lisa Jan 1-Jan-83-84, Lisa Jan 2-Apr-84 -85.
6. Croquet – http://www.opencroquet.org/ – a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications.
7. Dartmouth BASIC – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC – Wikipedia.
8. The Demonstration – http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html – Stanford University.
9. Dmoz Open Directory Project – http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Visual/ – Visual languages - Reference of programming languages - Visual languages.
10. The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan Kay – http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_II.html – 1967-69 – The FLEX Machine, a first attempt at an OOP-based personal computer – Alan Kay – Smalltalk .org.
11. Fifteen Years of the Web – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5243862.stm – Timeline of the Internet – BBC Technology.
12. Henry Lieberman – http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/ – Scientific Researcher – MIT Media Laboratory.
13. HCI History – http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/gwmrauterberg/presentations/HCI-history – Key Systems, People and Ideas – Presentation by Matthias Rauterberg.
14. History of HCI – Sketchpad (1963) – http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/gwmrauterberg/presentations/HCI-history/sld020.htm – Ivan Sutherland – MIT Lab – Presentation by Matthias Rauterberg.
15. Inventors of the modern computer – http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa031599.htm -The history of IBM PC – International Business Machines.
16. Jena – [http://jena.hpl.hp.com/juc2006/proceedings.html] – First Jena User Conference – Proceedings.
17. Recipients of the 2004 Kyoto Prize – [http://www.kyotoprize.org/commentary_kay.htm] – Recipients of the 2004 Kyoto Prize – Dr. Alan Curtis Kay (USA, 1940) – Computer Scientist, President, Viewpoints Research Institute.
18. OpenCyc – http://www.opencyc.org/ – OpenCyc.org – General Knowledge Base and Common Sense Reasoning Engine.
19. Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) – History – [http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html] – History of the PARK.
20. The apprentice programmer – http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=87912&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE – The ACM digital library.
21. Programming for example: http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/PBE/index.html.
22. Protege – http://protege.stanford.edu/ – Protégé Home – Ontology development environment.
23. Tim Berners – [http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Lee] – Tim Berners-Lee.
24. TopBraid – http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/ – Semantic Modeling Toolkit – Visual Modeling Environment.
25. What is Logo? – http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/index.html – MIT Logo Foundation, What is Logo.
26. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29 – Ajax (programming).
27. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_and_computation – Natural language processing.
28. Simula – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula – Simula.
29. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – http://www.w3.org – Bringing the Web to its Full Potential …