Very helpful, Tom and William, thank you. I'm especially interested in Tom's suggestion re: the general use of a menu as an efficient alternative to a command line--are there any specific resources anyone knows of that could offer a citation on that observation? for those interested, the 1996 Federal Standard 1037C (the Glossary of Telecommunication Terms) defines a menu as "a displayed list of options from which a user selects actions to be performed." (ATIS adopted this definition without change). The specificity of "list" is one of the ways games are confounding in this context, as games often replace what could be expressed in a list with lush manipulable simulations. 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 On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote:

Hello everyone,

Pop up and pull down menus had a specific genesis in the PARC/Xerox/Apple trajectory of GUI work and have been an object of historical curiosity. IIRC PARC had popup menus and Apple added pull down menus.

In contrast, menus in general are a fairly fundamental concept in interactive computing and I suspect would have appeared very early in the development of commands and applications for timesharing systems. The alternative to a menu was a command line system, but these required commands to be typed with no mistakes in exactly the right syntax. A menu guided users through valid options, which reduced the error rate and effectively let "help" information be integrated with the entry of commands. Menus could be used with teletypes as well as VDUs.

So my personal guess on the origin of menus would be in a very early interactive system such as MIT's CTSS, RAND's JOSS, or something from SDC. If you are interested in a specific "first" you would also need to develop a clear definition of "menu" to distinguish it from a command prompt.

Best wishes,

Tom

-----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of William McMillan Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:42 PM To: Laine Nooney; sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Resources re: history of menus in computing?

Hello, Laine.

Menus were central to the UI of UCSD Pascal, Ken Bowles's project in the 1970s. Bowles talked with Steve Jobs int he early days (and later, Gates) and some of the students who worked on UCSD Pascal went to Apple and influenced the development of the Lisa etc. Apple Pascal (an OS as well as a programming environment) for the Apple II was UCSD Pascal.

There are a lot of good web resources on UCSD Pascal, and I had a magazine article on its history in IEEE Spectrum.

This was certainly an early and influential deployment of a menu-driven UI. Games were developed in UCSD Pascal, but I don't know if they were notable at all.

- Bill - Hide quoted text -

On 3/15/14, Laine Nooney <laine.nooney@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

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

Hello everyone, Following on my earlier comments, the idea that computers have "users" with user interfaces or interactive dialogs only really goes mainstream in business data processing circles in the 1970s. A nice snapshot of the emerging conventional wisdom is given in J. Martin, Design of Man-Computer Dialogues. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Martin was a prolific author of books on business computing technology. On menus vs. command lines, a command line system would typically involve typing a command word followed, in many cases, by some parameters. There would very often be a "help" command that would list valid commands. A menu is, in its most primitive form, basically the same thing except that the help is displayed by default and the commands are short (usually one or two characters) so that the system will prompt for any further parameters or options needed. I remember a lot of terminal oriented menu systems involved two letter command codes. Laine is probably too young to remember browsing the web in a text terminal window using the Lynx browser. That turned the web into a menu system, not unlike Gopher. It is still possible to get around Windows with keyboard shortcuts. Tom From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Laine Nooney Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 11:45 AM To: sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Resources re: history of menus in computing? Very helpful, Tom and William, thank you. I'm especially interested in Tom's suggestion re: the general use of a menu as an efficient alternative to a command line--are there any specific resources anyone knows of that could offer a citation on that observation? for those interested, the 1996 Federal Standard 1037C (the Glossary of Telecommunication Terms) defines a menu as "a displayed list of options from which a user selects actions to be performed." (ATIS adopted this definition without change). The specificity of "list" is one of the ways games are confounding in this context, as games often replace what could be expressed in a list with lush manipulable simulations. best, Laine Nooney Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory Stony Brook University Editorial Assistant to the Journal of Visual Culture vcu.sagepub.com <http://vcu.sagepub.com/> www.lainenooney.com On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote: Hello everyone, Pop up and pull down menus had a specific genesis in the PARC/Xerox/Apple trajectory of GUI work and have been an object of historical curiosity. IIRC PARC had popup menus and Apple added pull down menus. In contrast, menus in general are a fairly fundamental concept in interactive computing and I suspect would have appeared very early in the development of commands and applications for timesharing systems. The alternative to a menu was a command line system, but these required commands to be typed with no mistakes in exactly the right syntax. A menu guided users through valid options, which reduced the error rate and effectively let "help" information be integrated with the entry of commands. Menus could be used with teletypes as well as VDUs. So my personal guess on the origin of menus would be in a very early interactive system such as MIT's CTSS, RAND's JOSS, or something from SDC. If you are interested in a specific "first" you would also need to develop a clear definition of "menu" to distinguish it from a command prompt. Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of William McMillan Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:42 PM To: Laine Nooney; sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Resources re: history of menus in computing? Hello, Laine. Menus were central to the UI of UCSD Pascal, Ken Bowles's project in the 1970s. Bowles talked with Steve Jobs int he early days (and later, Gates) and some of the students who worked on UCSD Pascal went to Apple and influenced the development of the Lisa etc. Apple Pascal (an OS as well as a programming environment) for the Apple II was UCSD Pascal. There are a lot of good web resources on UCSD Pascal, and I had a magazine article on its history in IEEE Spectrum. This was certainly an early and influential deployment of a menu-driven UI. Games were developed in UCSD Pascal, but I don't know if they were notable at all. - Bill - Hide quoted text - On 3/15/14, Laine Nooney <laine.nooney@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

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

I did not get a chance to put in my reply to Ramesh's message copied to me. This is my view of menus in 1970 and used in the first Delphi Conference System that year and later in EMISARI and EIES in 1971 and 1975. I think it provides some further views on menus that i just caught up with by getting access to sigcis.org which i will continue to track. If you go to the book The network Nation, hiltz and turoff in 1978 it has the original eies menus. The book was reprinted by mit press in 1993 and you can still get it from amazon. Menus were used largely with the tty interface that was the only thing available in general in those early days. however, they could be very efficient if done right. In our system we allowed users to answer questions ahead so if they had learned what the sequence of questions is that they had to answer to do something they could type answers ahead separated by commas so that all of them were done in one operation. If you put in a ? in a sequence of questions you could have the system stop in the sequence and get an answer. Finally, if instead of putting in a menu choice you put in a command +command it would execute that command. One important command was +store (name=question sequence) so that you could create your own commands to do sequences you are always doing. A map of the relationships of the menus was what most people used to learn the system and then when they found out what they would do most often they could create their own command structure for more experienced interactions among those who became frequent users of the systems. This approach can still work in todays screen oriented system and in many cases would be ideal for more complex systems with many alternatives. EIES and EMISARI (the 1971 emergency management system designed in the u.s. government for emergencies like the wage price freeze were not simple systems. They had many group communication features still waiting to be rediscovered in the new social media systems. If you want the full manuals for EIES and EMISARI they are stored on a collection of early reports on the NJIT library system. http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/index.php it is a library special collection. In hte EIES system we could design special interlaces for groups. You might check out the manual on the TOPICS system which those with group communication systems have still to discover how useful that sort of system can be. The very first group ware system i designed has a map structure given in the article that follows and includes the complete discussion with a very good group of computing professionals (Herb Grosch, Ruth Davis, and many other well known professionals). It was a delphi conference with anonymous voting.) . The discussion and voting was about future applications of the type of system they were using. It makes very interesting historical insights. Turoff, Murray, (1970) Delphi Conferencing: Computer Based Conferencing with Anonymity, Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change 3(2), 1970, 159-204. The map of menus in a complex system is great tool for newcomers that should be designed for any system-especially a game and especially for letting advanced users to tailor their own commands. feel free to reference any of my comments and you can reference the historical documents on EIES and EMISARI where this was all done for real time large group communication systems long before the current generation of social media systems. also feel free to ask roxanne or me further questions. -- please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com do not use @njit.eduaddress Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Subramanian, Ramesh Prof. < Ramesh.Subramanian@quinnipiac.edu> wrote:

Hello,

Menus were used in Murray Turoff's early computer conferencing systems starting in 1969/1970. Menus were also used in the HCL 8C microcomputer (India, 1978) as a way to provide an easy alternative to typing in the JCL on the keyboard. I can provide references, if needed.

Regards,

-Ramesh