UX History is a personal research project by Philip Weber

Early History

  • 330 B.C. - Ancient Egypt’s Library of Alexandria listed its contents in a 120-scroll bibliography, an early information architecture accomplishment
  • 1627 - French librarian and scholar Gabriel Naudé publishes Advice on Establishing a Library. This began the formalization of the field of library science, a field that would heavily inspire user experience.
  • 1876 - Melvil Dewey publishes the original four-page pamphlet outlining the Dewey Decimal Classification, one of the most famous examples of information architecture.

1910s

1930s

  • 1936 - “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” by Alan Turing is published
  • 1939 - Vannevar Bush publishes the essay “Mechanization and the Record”, introducing his Memex concept

1940s

1950s

1960s

  • 1963 - Ivan Sutherland creates a CAD program called sketchpad, the first program ever to utilize a complete graphical user interface
  • 1965 - Ted Nelson presented the paper “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate” at the ACM National Conference, in which he coined the term “hypertext”
  • 1965 - MIT Lincoln Lab uses packet-switching technology to allow two computers to communicate with one another.
  • 1966 - Disney and the role of joy
  • 1968 - DEC 9 - Douglas Engelbart gave the The Mother of All Demos, releasing the NLS ,AKA “oN-Line System
  • 1968 - Alan Kay develops the idea that will later be called the Dynabook, a mix between a laptop computer and a tablet

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

Sources