Topic: Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

[Pandora]

The gestures and metaphors of icon-driven computing feel so natural and effortless to us now, it seems strange to recall navigating in the digital world any other way.

Until Apple’s debut of the Macintosh in 1984, however, most of our interactions with computers looked more like this:



How did we get from there to here?



....

The genius of Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the rest of the Mac team was recognizing a huge untapped market for home computing among artists, musicians, writers, and other creative weirdos who might never have cared enough to master the arcane complexities of a command-line UI or blow a fortune on hulking digital workstations.

The challenge of designing a personal computer that “the rest of us” would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

...

Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

...

First Kare sketched a pointing finger for the “paste” command, using a pink magic marker.

[charlesoakwood]

Nice.

Took a DOS course in about '93 and the teacher, he had just written several programs for the county,
said the GUI would never succeed because it consumed too much memory which was technologically
impossible to build enough of or small enough and cheap enough for home use.  Now get to work and
learn the tree & those DOS commands.

[AlanS]

the teacher, he had just written several programs for the county,
said the GUI would never succeed because it consumed too much memory which was technologically
impossible to build enough of or small enough and cheap enough for home use. 

Real fortune teller there. I've probably forgotten what few DOS commands I used to know.

[Libertas]

I remember a few...and some early Lotus commands as well...everything is icon driven now, which is a good thing!

Worst course I ever took was a COBOL class...one little chacter out of place and your whole program crapped itself...and if you messed up bad enough you'd have the programmer bursting into the student lab demanding whose POS just vomited out the giant pile of paperm in his arms!