history question

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at disney.com
Wed Oct 27 22:49:21 UTC 1999


Okay, Okay ...

The first "icons" on a screen that I am aware of were the picture symbols
that stood for constraints in Sketchpad (ca. 1962). The idea of having
pictures on screen that stood for ideas was widespread in the ARPA
community in the 60s.
     The particular use of the word "icon" for these picture symbols came
ultimately from Jerome Bruner's "Iconic Mentality" as charaterized in books
such as "Towards a theory of instruction", ca. 1965. I read these books and
proposed in 1971 that part of our project at PARC should be "iconic
programming", coining a name for something for which there were already
examples (cf Ambit-G at Lincoln Labs, GRAIL at RAND, etc.). Dave Smith was
my graduate student and was specifically encouraged to do a thesis that
involved "iconic programming". The big contribution of the thesis was a
good start at "Programming by Example", which was a newer idea than
programming in pictures. Later, he did "SmallStar" which was the prototype
for the Xerox Star done in Smalltalk.
     At the very same time of Dave's thesis, Nicholas Negroponte was
creating "Dataland", which in its later incarnations (SDMS) was also one of
the sources for the ideas in the Mac Finder.

Cheers,

Alan

------

At 8:28 AM -0800 10/27/99, Mark Guzdial wrote:
>I understood that on-screen icons were invented by David Canfield Smith in
>his dissertation work, Pygmalion, an icon-based programming language
>written in Smalltalk-72.  David went on to be lead of the Xerox Star UI
>Design team, didn't he?
>
>Mark
>
>>  Recently someone asked in one of our internal newsgroups at SDRC
>>
>>"Does anyone know how icons came to be known as icons? Why they are called
>>that, who started it, etc?".
>>
>> I was thinking that ICONs may have been invented at PARC.  Probably
>>someone on this mailing list knows the answer and I'd like to hear the
>>real story.
>>
>>Thanks in advance,
>>
>> - Steve
>
>
>--------------------------
>Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
>(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
>http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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