interface
Computers have windows and some way of pointing at things on the display. Mobile devices are moving over to touch sensitive displays with ‘gestural’ commands. Here is some pre-history…
Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad demonstrated by Alan Kay. Sutherland’s PhD supervisor what Claude Shannon, and he in turn supervised Kay’s research. Alan Kay contributed to the development of modern GUIs.
Douglas Engelbart fronted a famous demonstration of an interactive text editor with file management. The demo was filmed but the sound track was picking up both the direct microphone signal and (somehow) the echo from the hall, so the voice sounds rather strange and ‘spooky’. Engelbart is basically demonstrating a system about as sophisticated as NotePad (but with paragraph level folding) and the ‘mouse’ has 5 buttons.
I’ve linked to videos of Engelbart’s demonstrations before, but now the videos are on YouTube as well.