Welcome back to Input Origins, our monthly exploration of how input devices evolved. This is our 24th edition, which means Input Origins is celebrating two years! To mark the occasion, rather than covering another device, we're going straight to where inputs are born!
Nearly every input method you use today was first invented in one of three hotbeds: aerospace, defense or assistive technology, often decades before it was widely adopted. The gaming and personal computing industries then refined them into devices people love to use. And science fiction imagined them long before anyone built them. Let's dig in!
Series Editor: Ariel Amar
The light gun of the SAGE air-defense system (1950s), one of the Cold War's many inputs
One KPI: Don't Lose the War
Imagine an R&D budget with no quarterly profit report, no shareholders and only one KPI: don't lose the war. That's defense, and during the Cold War it gave us the trackball (Input Origins #15), the light pen (#20), the mouse (#3) and the touchscreen (#13).
The touchscreen is a prime example. Its first version came in 1965, when Britain's Royal Radar Establishment needed operators to select radar targets faster, without taking their eyes off the screen. Engineer E.A. Johnson's solution was to lay fine copper wires across the display, so it could feel the electric charge of a fingertip. His screen isn't the direct ancestor of today's, but it was the first. It also follows the classic pattern: inputs born in aerospace and defense reach the rest of us decades later. The trackball waited thirty years for the arcade, the mouse twenty for the Macintosh, and the touchscreen forty for the smartphone.
A FingerWorks multi-touch surface, adopted by an audio engineer for his daily work.
Assistive Tech: When There's No Other Way
In defense, losing isn't an option. And for someone who can't use a keyboard or mouse at all, finding another way is the only option. Out of that necessity, many input methods were first invented as assistive technology, and later adapted for everyone else. For example, T9 predictive text (the old phone feature that guessed your word from a single key press per letter), more a UX than an input device, grew out of an eye-typing device for people with paralysis, then was adapted for the 9-key phone keypad used by billions.
The touchscreen we met earlier is, yet again, a prime example! It was reinvented for assistive use, completely unrelated to the 1965 original! Wayne Westerman, a PhD student at the University of Delaware, had a dissertation to write, but his repetitive strain injury made every keystroke painful. So he built a multi-touch keyboard surface that needed zero force to type on. (Input Origins #19) It was so helpful that he founded a company around it with his PhD advisor, John Elias: FingerWorks. Apple bought FingerWorks in 2005, and its technology became the basis for the first iPhone's touchscreen!
The same controller from your living room, now flying drones and steering periscopes.
How Gaming & PCs Polish Rough Inventions
Gaming and personal computing play a different role. While they rarely invent new input technologies, they're the ones who hone them into products that are comfortable to use. When Steve Jobs saw Xerox's mouse, it cost $300 and, by his account, broke within two weeks. So he asked the designers at Hovey-Kelley (today's IDEO) for one that cost under $15, lasted for years and rolled just as well on a Formica desk as on a pair of blue jeans. That became the Macintosh mouse.
And sometimes, the products gaming perfects become so good that fields far beyond the living room adopt them, defense included! In 2018, the US Navy's Virginia-class submarines started operating their periscope systems with an Xbox 360 controller. The $30 controller replaced a hand grip and control panel costing about $38,000, and since many sailors already knew it from home, they figured it out within minutes instead of hours of training.
Minority Report (2002): sci-fi's most famous gesture-based user interface>
Sci-Fi: Inputs Dreamed Up Decades Early
Before any input gets invented or honed, someone has to imagine it, and that's where science fiction comes in. It's the playground where ideas are first imagined, and it makes an idea feel real before it exists. In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey showed astronauts watching the news on flat tablets, so convincingly that Samsung's lawyers cited it in court against Apple's iPad (the judge wasn't buying it). Amazon has said the Star Trek computer was its north star for Alexa. And Minority Report's hand-waving screens were designed by MIT researcher John Underkoffler, who then founded a company to build them for real.
Put it all together and you get the life story of most inputs you use today. Science fiction often dreams them up first. Defense and assistive technology build the first versions, out of money or out of necessity. Then gaming and personal computing hone them until they're comfortable enough for everyone. So the next time you tap, swipe or scroll, remember it might be thanks to some Cold War engineers, a PhD student whose wrists hurt too much to type, or a Spielberg film.
One last thing before we sign off. After 24 editions, we do hope this series has helped you understand the fascinating yet complex story of human-machine interaction. Pushing that story forward is what drives us at Mudra. So stay tuned for next month's edition, because it might be a particularly interesting one.
