[SIGCIS-Members] Resources re: history of menus in computing?

[William McMillan]

Not to beat a dead horse on the menu topic, but the concept of a menu as
any mechanism allowing users to select from a fixed set of actions when
prompted, without having to type long commands, occurs to any programmer
who writes code for even pretty simple user interactions.  In fact, it's a
lot easier to create such a UI than to write code to parse command lines.
I doubt it would be possible to identify an earliest use (or cluster of
uses) of such UIs among all the programs that were created in the early
days for TTYs or dumb terminals.

On the topic of the menu *bar*, though--as Tom points out--Xerox PARC seems
to have settled that frontier first, though they didn't deploy it
commercially (Xerox Star) until 3-4 years after the UCSD p-System, with its
drop-down menus, was out on the market.  In one of my interviews of him,
Ken Bowles, the leader of the UCSD project, didn't recall any influence of
PARC's ideas on his team, but you never can be sure about how memes might
worm their way into various places.

- Bill



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Laine Nooney <laine.nooney at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm currently pulling together a short essay for a game history lexicon on
> the emergence of the menu in games. This topic is running me a bit in
> circles--menus seem to be one of those components that are so "obvious," or
> taken for granted in the game dev realm, that they aren't deeply,
> explicitly talked about.
>
> I'm wondering what the respective literature around "menus" might be in
> the history of computing. Are there obvious touchstones or definitive
> transitions to be aware of (especially beyond the visible
> PARC/Apple/Windows GUI histories)?
>
> And to be clear, I'm trying to keep this distinct from UI issues (insofar
> as that's possible!)
>
> Any leads, food for thought, or general chatter would be much appreciated!
>
> Best,
>
> Laine Nooney
> Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory
> Stony Brook University
>
> Editorial Assistant to the Journal of Visual Culture
> vcu.sagepub.com
>
> www.lainenooney.com
>
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