History of end user programming

1960

In the 1960s Dartmouth BASIC programming language [7] it was designed and implemented at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Over time, BASIC became a popular language for home users and for business use, introducing many people to programming as a hobby or career. Many of the modern concepts of computer graphics, dynamic objects, and object-oriented programming were created by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in Sketchpad. [13][14]. In the mid-1960s, Seymour Papert, a mathematician who had been working with Piaget in Geneva, came to the United States, where he co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky. Papert worked with the team of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, led by Wallace Feurzeig who created the first version of Logo. [25] in 1967. Late 1960s Alan Kay [2][3][17] he used the term ‘personal computer’ and created a conceptual prototype, the FLEX machine. He also considered a ‘Dynabook’ machine, the sketches for this look a lot like laptops of the last few years. the drill [28] The language was developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard and this included object-oriented concepts. Douglas Engelbert worked on a project to augment the human intellect, as part of the Augment [8] project demonstrating Hypertext and videoconferencing.

1970

Alan Kay joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) [17][19] California in 1971. Throughout the 1970s, the PARC group led by Dr. Kay developed an integrated programming language and programming environment called Smalltalk. [10]. In the early 1970s, the Alto personal computer was created at PARC. The Alto finally introduced the world’s first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor, a commercial mouse for input, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a bitmap display, and offered menus and icons and connected to a local area network. The Alto provided the basis for Xerox’s STAR 8010 information system. There was still a need to find a common use for a personal computer that would increase the demand for it. In 1978, Harvard Business School student Daniel Bricklin came up with the idea for an interactive visible calculator. Bricklin and Bob Frankston later co-invented the VisiCalc software program. [1]. VisiCalc was a spreadsheet and the first ‘killer’ application for personal computers, as this application provided a rationale for using personal computers as a productive tool.

1980

During the 1980s, personal computer ownership became increasingly popular, and many home users programmed using BASIC. In the early 1980s, IBM developed the first personal computer built from standard parts (called open architecture). [15]. This included a command line operating system written by Microsoft and the Microsoft BASIC programming language. Apple further developed the GUI for Lisa [5] which later became the Macintosh (Mac). The IBM-style PC became more popular for business applications, while the Apple Mac was often used for desktop publishing.

1990

End-user programming research has continued to this day. Research has continued in Visual Programming techniques [9] for example Alice [4]Programming by example [2][21]automated assisted scheduling [20]and natural language programming [27]. Squeak and Croquet[6] they have developed from early work on Smalltalk.

Tim Berners-Lee [23] developed HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and has been involved with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [29] in the development of standard base languages ​​for the Web. This has fostered the growth of the ‘Semantic Web’ [11] allowing both humans and computers to search for and interact with pages more, and thus encouraged the development of interactive web pages and communities.

years 2000

Recent, present and future research may enable the use of semantic web technologies (developed from HTML by Tim Berners-Lee [23] and others), to enable end user programming. This fusion of research and technologies is illustrated on Henry Lieberman’s home page. [12] which has explanations of both areas of research. Examples of this merger include Protected [22]Jenna [16]TopBraid Composer [24]and Open Cyc [18]. Information on these technologies is available on my semantic web page: http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm. A related development is that of web 2.0. AJAX-based visual development environments (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) [26] they aim to reproduce on the web the functionality provided by office tools such as Excel (which is often used as an end-user programming environment). Information on Ajax and Web 2.0 is available on my Ajax/web2.0 page: http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htm.

References

1. A Brief History of Spreadsheets – http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html – Decision Support System Resources – by DJ Power, Publisher, DSSResources.COM.

2. Alan Kay – http://www.acypher.com/wwid/FrontMatter/index.html – See what I do – Programming for example.

3. Alan Kay’s ETech 2003 Presentation – http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html – Lisa Rein’s tour of Alan Kay’s Etech 2003 presentation.

4. Alice v2.0 – http://www.alice.org/ – Learn to program interactive 3D graphics.

5. Apple Lisa – http://fp3.antelecom.net/gcifu/applemuseum/lisa2.html – The first affordable GUI – Lisa Jan 1-83 Jan-84, Lisa Jan 2-84 Apr-85.

6. Croquet – http://www.opencroquet.org/ – a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications.

7. Dartmouth BASIC – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC – Wikipedia.

8. The Demo – http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html – Stanford University.

9. Dmoz Open Directory Project – http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Visual/ – Visual Languages ​​- Programming Languages ​​Reference – Visual Languages.

10. The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay – http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_II.html – 1967-69–The FLEX Machine, an early attempt at a personal computer based on object-oriented programming – Alan Kay – Smalltalk.org.

11. Fifteen Years of the Web – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5243862.stm – Internet Timeline – BBC Technology.

12. Henry Lieberman – http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/ – Research Scientist – MIT Media Lab.

13. HCI History – http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/gwmrauterberg/presentations/HCI-history – Systems, people and key ideas – Presentation by Matthias Rauterberg.

14. History of HCI – Sketchpad (1963) – http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/gwmrauterberg/presentations/HCI-history/sld020.htm – Ivan Sutherland – MIT Lab – Presentation by Matthias Rauterberg.

15. Inventors of the Modern Computer – http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa031599.htm -The Story of the IBM PC – International Business Machines.

16. Jenna- [http://jena.hpl.hp.com/juc2006/proceedings.html] – First Jena Users Conference – Proceedings.

17. 2004 Kyoto Prize Laureates – [http://www.kyotoprize.org/commentary_kay.htm] – 2004 Kyoto Prize Laureates – Dr. Alan Curtis Kay (USA, b. 1940) – Computer Scientist, President, Viewpoints Research Institute.

18. OpenCyc – http://www.opencyc.org/ – OpenCyc.org – General knowledge base and common sense reasoning engine.

19. Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) – History – [http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html] – History of the PARK.

20. The Programming Apprentice – http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=87912&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE – The ACM Digital Library.

21. Programming by example – http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/PBE/index.html.

22. Protege – http://protege.stanford.edu/ – Protégé Home – Ontology development environment.

23. Tim Berners- [http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Lee] – Tim Berners-Lee.

24. TopBraid – http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/ – Semantic modeling toolset – Visual modeling environment.

25. What is the logo? – http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/logo/index.html – MIT Logo Foundation, What is Logo?

26. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29 – Ajax (programming).

27. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_and_computation – Natural Language Processing.

28. Simulate – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula – Simulate.

29. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – http://www.w3.org – Taking the Web to its fullest potential….

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