Without computers, HCI would not be a profession. Software that HCI designers work on is steeped in history and knowing the foundations will allow you to take steps into the future more confidently, therefore, let's rewind a bit and understand how we got here.
Very early history – the 17th century
Since the beginning of civilization, there is proof of human beings' ability to quantify and record their interactions. The computer is the outcome of millennia of knowledge, all now combined into handheld devices that allow us to quantify our existence. The long tail of human accomplishment and innovation that have brought us to today are too numerous to count, but we have been able to advance faster than any other time due to our ability to harness the accomplishments of our forefathers in computing history.
In the Enlightenment era, we had logician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (a 17th/18th century German philosopher and mathematician) who invented...