Input Origins #17: The Spark - Mater artium necessitas
Welcome back to - Input Origins - your monthly time machine through the evolution of control.This time, we aren't covering a device, nor an input method.
This month we are doing something special. We will go further back, to the moment before the invention. The spark! What makes someone look at the world and think: "there should be a better way to control this!?"
Some of the most common input methods we use were not invented for their own sake, but rather, they were first playfully entertained. musings. Many more originated to serve a need, to solve a problem. Not in a lab searching for the next best input.
Editor: Ariel Amar
These Were Not on the Roadmap
Think about the inventors we've covered. Douglas Engelbart was trying to make it easier to point at objects on a screen, not particularly into inventing input methods (Input Origins #3).
William Higinbotham, the inventor of the first gamepad, was a physicist playing around with the missile trajectory computer at his lab to create a bouncing ball game, effectively inventing the first ever game-pad in the process! (Input Origins #10).
And Ralph Benjamin, the inventor of the trackball, merely needed a better way to follow aircraft on a radar screen, and a rolling ball solved it (Input Origins 15#).
The input device comes second. The need, coupled with the observation, came first. This is the story, time immemorial, of how humans create new tools. HCI is just another part in this long procession.
Mater artium necessitas
This month, we bring you two stories about how a simple observation and the desire to make something a little more comfortable changed the way we interact with machines forever.
The First Doom Scroll
In 1993, Microsoft program manager Eric Michelman was watching Excel users struggle to navigate massive spreadsheets, having to click endlessly to scroll, losing their place in the sheet and their patience in the process. He thought: there has to be a better way to move through a document!
His first idea was actually a zoom lever, a joystick that would shrink and expand your view. Microsoft's hardware team did not like the idea. But when colleagues pushed him toward scrolling instead, something clicked (pun intended). As the story goes, the hardware team had already been considering putting a wheel on the mouse but had no idea what to use it for. Document navigation answered that question.
The IntelliMouse shipped in July 1996. And the rest is Input Origins history.
The Microsoft IntelliMouse (1996) — the mouse that made the scroll wheel standard. It started with a frustrated Excel user.
Calculator + Bullet train = D Pad?
In the late 1970s, Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi was riding the Shinkansen when he noticed a salaryman idly pressing buttons on his pocket calculator. The man wasn't calculating, he was killing time on the train, fidgeting. Yokoi saw an adult who wanted to play but had nothing to play with.
During that time, Sharp and Casio's calculator price war had flooded the market with cheap LCD screens, and Yokoi saw a different use for them. The result was the legendary Game & Watch, 43.4 million units sold. He called this philosophy "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology." (枯れた技術の水平思考).
And because a joystick wouldn't fit on its tiny screen, Yokoi invented the D-pad: a flat, four-directional control under a thumb. One observation on a train led to an input method that's been on every Gamepad and remote ever since.
The Nintendo Game & Watch (1980) — born from a calculator observation on a bullet train.
From Test Subject to Inventor
Guy Wagner's path started in a university lab, not as a researcher at first, but as a test subject! As a student, he volunteered at the Evoked-Potentials lab at the university, strapped with electrodes.
One of the experiments conducted in the lab that caught his eye was trying to move a cursor using EEG (brainwaves). It was early brain-computer interface work, and it was clunky. The equipment was massive. But what he saw in that lab, videos of humans and animals controlling limbs and computers with their minds using implants, stuck with him.
Ten years passed. Wagner became a hardware engineer. It was the time when wearable tech started to become popular, Fitbit, Pebble. Apple Watch was on the horizon. Seeing all of this miniaturization happening, Wagner thought to himself: what if it is now possible to fit a sensor on a wrist so it could read the same signals?
So he started building. Working until late every night after his day job as an engineer, etching circuit boards by hand, testing whether the signals could actually be read. That was the a-ha moment that brought about Mudra, the first ever wrist-based neural input band.
Neural Input - From a hand-etched Arduino prototype to this. A decade of development in a band on your wrist.
Before Innovation, Attention
Three very different sparks. A Nintendo engineer watching a man fidget on a train. A Microsoft program manager watching people struggle with spreadsheets. A student strapped with electrodes who saw the future, and spent a decade waiting for the technology to catch up. The same pattern underneath: someone paid attention to something everyone else ignored, and saw an input method hiding inside it.
Innovation isn't always about building something new. Sometimes it's about seeing what is always there.
