From Typing to Swiping: A Brief History of Interaction Design

This document provides a brief history of interaction design from mechanical tools before 1945 to the development of computers from the 1940s to 1960s. It describes early users like mad scientists and inventors interacting with mechanical gears and cranks. It then outlines the development of programmable computers like ENIAC, the transition to stored program architectures, and how users like experts and pioneers interacted with punch cards and tape to perform high speed calculations for applications like rocket science. Finally, it discusses the development of mainframe computing in the 1960s with users like computer center acolytes interacting with terminals and teletype machines for batch processing to support information intensive businesses.