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

Chuck House housec1839 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 3 07:47:08 PDT 2014


not to muddy the water, but my team at HP building Logic Analyzers got some of the first patents on pull-down stacks.  The specific patents became an issue for HP when Agilent was divested, since this was the “most licensed” patent in HP history, and to think it went to an instrument team from the mid-seventies irked the entire computer group.

Chuck

On Apr 3, 2014, at 7:17 AM, William McMillan <wmcmillan at emich.edu> wrote:

> 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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