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The changing face of computers on screen

Introduction

When I first joined BHP IT Newcastle in 1996, I recall one of the senior managers there mentioning a recent TV interview he’d done for the local station. As I recall it, the interview was about some new investments being made by BHP IT in Newcastle, and the journalist at the time wanted to do the interview in the computer room, standing in front of a bank of computers.

The “bank of computers” they picked was actually the primary network rack. Why? Because they had the most blinking lights.

The early years – The unfathomable future

I was introducing “Alien” (1979) last night to Darren and a couple of friends, and at one point when we paused the movie, we paused, not to discuss the relative merits of the thriller genre, or chestbursters, but the computers that were envisaged when the movie was produced. I’m not talking about the displays, mind you; while they’re incredibly primitive, they’re a symptom of the time and they can be accepted as having a certain kitsch nostalgia:

Enduring 8-bit graphics and primitive vector graphics are a necessity when you watch a movie of this age, and you just learn to deal with them.

What’s most noticeable though is how computers were presented. Let’s look at a couple of stills from “Alien”, as an example:

These images represent a lot about how computers – even futuristic computers – were imagined. In particular, common themes were:

Lots of blinking lights. (The “mother” room in the shot with Tom Skerritt is perhaps one of the best examples of this.)
Lots of buttons. Rows and rows and rows of buttons.
The vast majority of the buttons have no label on them whatsoever.

“Alien” was released in 1979, and it was indicative of the attitude towards computers from that era. For comparison, consider “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, released in December 1979:

Lots of flashing lights – Check
Lots of buttons – Check
Buttons without labels – Check

Even if we go back to 1968, when “The Ultimate Computer”, an episode of “Star Trek” was first aired, we can see that overall there were a lot of similarities between how computers were represented:

Buttons. Lots of buttons.

Jumping forward to 1984 when Doctor Who, “Resurrection of the Daleks” was broadcast, we see a console in the TARDIS that looks like the following:

Again, don’t get focused on the graphics on-screen, but check out the interface – a keyboard (and an ABCDEF… rather than QWERTY style layout, to boot).

Jumping to “2001″, released in 1968, the presentation of computers even then was focused on buttons and flashing lights (with the exception that HAL of course was AI and had a full speech interface):

Bearing in mind at this stage – anywhere between 1968 and 1984 – computers were devices that were barely understood by lay people; in 1968 in particular, one of the founding computers of the “new digital age”, the IBM S/360, had only been out for four years. People were, quite frankly, only just barely starting to get their minds around what even these primitive (by our current standards) systems could do.

By 1984, while there were 8-bit desktop computers (Commodore, Apple II series, etc.), the burgeoning industry was really only just starting to strap the training wheels on; Apple’s pivotal 1984 ad (January 22, 1984) to introduce the Macintosh didn’t actually feature the computer itself, and interfaces in terms of what the average person might be aware of were well and truly mired in the keyboards and the flashing lights. Computers were still often seen as the domain of men, and computer users were still closer to mechanics than consumers.

The changing face

Eventually though, something significant started to happen with the representation of computers on-screen. This change profoundly demonstrated the evolving attitude of people towards these previously enigmatic devices.

1987 represented a good turning point in the way computer interfaces were shown on screen, with the start of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. This introduced a touch-screen interface used throughout the series, LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) which had no hardware based buttons at all:

Since these interface boards were completely workshop developed, the most they featured on screen in terms of human interaction were blinking lights and changing light levels in response to touch; it would be relatively easy to imagine though that the specific purpose of such a touch-screen interface would have been to allow the interface to be redesigned/represented on the fly based on the operational function being performed at the time.

Jump forward to 2002, with the release of “Minority Report” (a populist B grade movie), and you had the presentation of an alternate to a touch interface – a gestural augmented reality interface:

This style of interface had the user wear gloves that allowed motion tracking and interaction with the interface to the point that gestures could be used to slide content around, bring it in and out of focus, etc. While futuristic, and predictive of interfaces being developed along the Kinect product line, it did always seem an awful lot of hard work, as exemplified by the exasperated and overly theatrical gestures used in the German science fiction spoof, “Dreamship Surprise” (2004):

(Difficult to portray in a single image; the Queen becomes particularly frustrated with the continual flicking of the zoom-out operation.)

Moving to more recent movies, “Quantum of Solace” (2008) kicked things up a gear by presenting a fully touch-screen multi-user interactive desk:

Here, users could swivel objects around, zoom and expand them, slide them across the desk to other users, etc.

“Avatar” (2009) went further on the interface front, having users move apps and processes from a main monitor/computer onto a portable tablet (something for which no screen shot does justice); ironically since starting to use the Mac app “Teleport” some years ago, I’ve frequently found myself trying to drag windows/applications between computers; quite simply, what Avatar shows isn’t really all that futuristic, but rather, inevitable.

So what happened?

What happened between the movies and TVs of the older era (mid-80s and older) and those of the newer era?

The shift was profound yet entirely subtle, something that a lot of people wouldn’t have really noticed at all – we shifted from portraying computer hardware to portraying computer software.

Think of it – Alien, 2001, Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc. – they were all focused on computers as big chunks of hardware that were physically manipulated; switches were pulled or flipped, buttons were toggled or hit, and there was a lot of non-intuitive feedback in the form of pulsating and blinking lights. A computer was an often substantially large piece of hardware that would be approached by the user on-screen as if they were approaching an altar, or entering a place of worship. The human was typically portrayed as intruding on the computer rather than using the computer.

None of which, of course, reflected where computers were actually heading.

At some point though, fiction and the future aligned, and the way in which computers were presented changed to being all about the interface – the software. This was of course just holding up a mirror to society in general: since computers have been around, their usage model has been undergoing a significantly powerful evolution from being a specific tool to being a general purpose piece of equipment; the logical continuance from a “piece of equipment” is an appliance, and that’s the era we’re starting to straddle into now, thanks in no small part to interfaces such as iOS.

The fact that we’re so comfortable with such depictions of computers in fiction now speaks volumes of how far our perception of computers have come – how mainstream they’ve become. (And, for that matter, how powerful they’ve become. Your average smart phone has more significantly processing power and RAM than your average computer from ten years ago.)

What I find particularly amusing about this shift in the portrayal of computers on screen is how there’s still some rigid holdouts in IT who haven’t yet got the picture. Because computers and computing devices are shifting towards appliances, the average consumers aren’t interested in the amount of RAM they’ve got, or the speed of the processor, so long as it works, just the same way that consumers don’t generally inquire as to the number of heating elements per bread slot in a toaster, etc. “Does it toast? Yes: good. Does it look aesthetically pleasing for my kitchen? Yes: good. Is it a suitable price for the function? Yes: good.” That’s the overall decision making process that goes into a toaster.

Movies and TV shows often tell us fantastical stories that have little to no grounding in reality; yet at some point they collectively started to demonstrate the shift that was being experienced in computing – the movement away from the specific hardware to the general and nigh on infinitely adaptable software. They started working on the basis that the hardware was almost completely irrelevant to the actions you performed on it, which was completely setup and controlled in the software.

And they did it without most of us even noticing it.

63 Responses to "The changing face of computers on screen"

Joshua Miller says:

2013/01/10 at 05:43

What about our representation of future computers in our movies and TV shows today will seems woefully inaccurate to people 30 years from now?

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1. preston says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 05:56
  
  I agree we typically represent computers of the future woefully … but at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, we at least shifted from portraying them as hardware monstrosities to the portrayal being all about the interface.
  
  Reply
2. Harper Lieblich says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 06:27
  
  My guess is that the idea of an interface being confined to a screen will seem antiquated 30 years from now. It’s likely that images, projected directly into a user’s eyeball, will give the illusion of the interface being directly integrated in to our physical environment.
  
  A more immediate example of this will be that instead of viewing a map representing your driving route on a screen in the dashboard of your car, you’ll simply follow a line that appears to be laid out on the road.
  
  Go even further out than 30 years, and the ideas put forward by people like Ray Kurzweil, suggest that the computer interface will be imbedded directly into our brains, and the distinction between a user’s biological brain and his or her synthetic computer brain will be irrelevant.
  
  Which means that science fiction depicting stories that take place 100 years from now shouldn’t have any computers at all. It will simply be people reacting to information streaming into their heads.
  
  Reply
Rob Marquardt says:

2013/01/10 at 06:01

Also the dip in quality of the computer displays themselves. From high quality, done with traditional animation and projection (2001), to low quality, done with actual computers of the time (Alien, Star Trek The Motion Picture), and then back again to high quality, done with modern computers.

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1. preston says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 06:15
  
  That’s certainly a good point – thanks.
  
  Reply
Jon #2 says:

2013/01/10 at 06:46

I think the most important factor is not that Hollywood became enlightened, but that it became possible to represent software in a movie. Kubrick made computer displays by drawing each frame on film and projecting it onto the back of the set (with a projector!). Star Trek: TNG made computer displays by cutting and gluing colored translucent sheets to a piece of glass and putting lights behind them. We had great computer interaction visionaries in the past, too, but it simply wasn’t feasible to put their ideas in a movie.

Most TV shows and movies today have flashy computer displays because it’s cheap and easy to make a fake flashy computer display. It’d actually be more expensive today to build a big “computer” set. I don’t think anybody who has seen a sci-fi movie or TV show in the past 10 years, and knows anything at all about computers, believes that filmmakers design fictional computers like they do because they’re trying to be realistic representations of (either current or future) computers. “CSI” could put accurate computer dialogue in their show for free, but they don’t.

Of course, actual futuristic user interfaces wouldn’t film well, because they would assume knowledge the viewer doesn’t have, and rely on subtleties of movement that the user can’t see. Sun’s “Starfire” demo was perhaps one of the most accurate depictions of future user interfaces, and it had to be scripted precisely to lead viewers through everything it did. Actual futuristic interfaces today would look unrealistic to current audiences, just as actual current interfaces of today shown to 1960′s audiences would look unrealistic.

Computers in movies changed to be flashy because it’s a cheap effect, just like most everything else in modern cinema. They’re not being more accurate because they want to, or because viewers want to see that. Filmmakers don’t care about computer realism, and they couldn’t film it well even if they did.

BTW, your “toaster” analogy is not a good one. Nobody I know would ever recommend buying a toaster, when a toaster *oven* can be had for roughly the same price, yet provide significantly more function. In that way, every (slotted, bread) toaster is very poor at “suitable price for the function”.

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Luis Masanti says:

2013/01/10 at 06:55

As far as I recall, the Jetsons (1962-68) show a good idea of the videophone that still is missing… except from 2001.
(Yes, I’m also waiting for the flying cars.)

Maybe, Blade Runner’s computers (and flying cars!) should be considered. Siri-in-diapers?

On the other hand, what was the most visible characteristic of pre-iPhone smartphones (a.k.a. BlackBerry)? Buttons!
With the iPhone, also the phone is a (software) app!

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1. Hamranhansenhansen says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 12:33
  
  The video phone is here in iPhone/FaceTime. You call the same phone numbers you’ve been calling for 20 years, only now there is video.
  
  Reply
  1. SeanJA says:
    
    2013/01/10 at 23:01
    
    The first “public video telephone” was created in 1936 and the picture phone was around in 1964 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videophone ) my dad had one in the 90s for work. So… you could have been using a video phone for 20+ years too…
    
    Reply
    1. SeanJA says:
      
      2013/01/11 at 07:42
      
      Actually, we had this one for a while (my dad might still have it) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bildtelefon_T-View_100.JPG
      
      Reply
Wheat Williams says:

2013/01/10 at 07:17

You should reference the 1982 movie “Airplane II” where William Shatner himself spoofs Captain Kirk and Star Trek. An underling calls him to a huge bank of blinking lights and says, “Captain! Something is wrong! All these lights are blinking out of sequence!” Shatner replies, “Well, make them blink IN sequence!

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Joel Dueck says:

2013/01/10 at 07:23

I wrote about this in my 2010 post Screens. I used only two examples from pop culture, though; your evidence is more extensive and more interesting as a result. The example I used to depict the transition point from hardware- to software-portrayal was Wargames (1983), which coincides nicely with your transition point (“mid-80s”). Wargames includes a good deal of both screens and blinkenlights, but is pretty software-centric for the most part, and possibly a bit ahead of its time in that respect.

As I wrote in that post, I think the word you’re looking for wrt the “older era” portrayal of computers is appliance.

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Scott Ahten says:

2013/01/10 at 08:26

Sick with whatever has been going around for the last week, I ended up watching all four seasons of the CBS series Enterprise. Strangely enough, they depict computers in both ways, and everything goes backwards when they encounter the 23rd-century USS Defiant from an alternate universe.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/315059
http://www.hulu.com/watch/315060

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Ronald Nicholson says:

2013/01/10 at 08:28

You are completely missing a decade or more when computers were represented in the media by spinning 9-track vacuum tape drives, wall sized cabinets, and maybe a teletypewriter console. Or consoles with tons of toggle switches. See the Univac news photos circa the Eisenhower election of 1952.

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Hunter Moon says:

2013/01/10 at 08:38

The article is an interesting read and the pics are cool and nostalgic, but I think the author draws too long a bow and also reveals more about his constrained view of “computer” than about the views of filmmakers of yore.

For instance, I interact with several computers on a daily basis, only thee of which have a multi-purpose output device: Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The last two have a multi-purpose I/O in the same device. But, I interact with a computer that controls the temperature in my office and it has 8 buttons, a tiny display that only shows three sets of numbers, and a green light and a red light. In interact daily with a computer that controls nearly every aspect of my automobile and it has a whole bunch of buttons, a lot of lights, and about 6 analog dials. I interact daily with a computer that wakes me up in the morning, and again, it has a number of buttons, a light or two, and a single purpose display that can display 4 digits and a colon. In interact with a computer sitting on my desk that takes care of telephony for me. It has 33 buttons and four lights.

I could go on, but you get the point. Nearly every mechanical or electrical system we interact with on a daily basis is now controlled by a computer and we interact with them through a very limited interface, because that is all that is required. It is only the multi-purpose computers like my Mac, iPad, and iPhone that have multi-purpose I/O.

But, like the author, most of us have forgotten that these other computers are computers at all. In the older days, they knew this and represented computers accordingly. They did have multi-purpose computers that were interacted with, but they were interacted with by voice, like one would with a person. Think HAL and the ship computer on Star Trek.

That is the real future envisioned by the old filmmakers that we have not quite reached yet, even with Siri.

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1. preston says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 08:54
  
  It’s an interesting take, but I’d respond that I actually do have a fairly broad understanding of what a computer is – you’re perhaps disagreeing on syntax as much as anything. I make the appliance/computer distinction fairly strongly. Yes, most appliances have computers in them, but when I refer to a computer I’m referring to something designated as such, not a standard appliance that happens to have a computer in it in the fashion of say, a fridge, or clock radio, or digital radio receiver, etc.
  
  Reply
  1. PeteSkiet says:
    
    2013/01/11 at 19:21
    
    You might be confusing syntax with semantics
    
    Reply
    1. preston says:
      
      2013/01/11 at 19:38
      
      Indeed I was. Thanks. I’m blaming that insufficient coffee intake at that hour
      
      Reply
2. Hamranhansenhansen says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 13:11
  
  Your alarm clock is very definitely not a “computer,” it is just an app. A hardware app, but still just an app. A “computer” has always meant programmable, general purpose computer. A device to run software like a CD player runs music.
  
  My alarm clock has not had mechanical buttons since June, 2007 when I replaced a hardware clock (app) with a software clock (app) running on a touchscreen computer. Since then, whole racks of hardware music apps have been converted to software apps, as well as portable multitrack audio recorders and many other devices. The mixers in my music studio run on iPads, the reverbs and audio synthesizers run inside a Mac with a multitouch trackpad that is 98% there towards being a full touchscreen computer.
  
  All the apps are going software-only just like music and video went software-only. All the hardware is going general purpose, so it can run any kind of app. There are custom hardware devices that cost $1000 being replaced by a $329 iPad mini and a $20 app, and the iPad mini just runs that one app, everyday all day, all of its life because it is cheaper, smaller, faster, than the $1000 dedicated hardware (app) and also much smaller, lighter, and wireless. And the software app gets improved every 3 months, instead of the hardware app never improving.
  
  So your hardware apps are all just obsolete. You could just as easily buy an alarm clock from 1950 if you desired, but that also has nothing to do with the future of computing.
  
  A whole general purpose computer with more power than any 20th century Mac or Windows system is smaller than your smallest fingernail today and costs less than $5. It is all general purpose hardware for the foreseeable future, and all apps will be software. That is why iPhones have a real Unix operating system with rock-solid stability and security. iPhone has to be more reliable than dedicated hardware, because iPhone apps are replacing dedicated hardware apps.
  
  Reply
Charles Eicher says:

2013/01/10 at 10:01

I thought you might like a comparison from far outside Hollywood.

I found this interesting film (in polish, alas no subtitles) Test Pilota Pirxa from 1978. It’s from a set of short stories by Stanislaw Lem, written between 1959 and about 1971. The first few minutes sets the theme of a Cold War era technological state apparatus. For the spaceship computer interface, fast forward to about 46:09

http://youtu.be/1zatvPHavWg

But that wasn’t actually the film I was looking for. A more contemporary look at Lem’s work, I like Ijon Tichy: Raumspilot. This episode is from somewhere between 2007-2011, Tichy gets an invitation to put his computer copilot into a competition. But she didn’t know was computer generated. Oh but the hardware, at one point he installs a color inkjet cartridge into his stove full of cogs and springs, this is the master computer.

http://youtu.be/o4KAiMkyYBg

What I’m showing you here is the dichotomy between Big Science that serves the state and universal goals, vs. humbler personal technology. All the Hollywood movies were designed by Very Serious Men as scriptwriters and prop artists. But the Eastern European films were not necessarily of that sensibility. In particular, I recommend to you the final moment of Ijon Tichy film. BTW, there are more of them on youtube, some with subtitles.

Reply
1. jms says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 12:59
  
  Thanks for the link. The book is available in an English translation — “Tales of Pirx the Pilot.” It’s a very fun book and I highly recommend it .
  
  Reply
2. Scot Mcphee says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 13:10
  
  I think actually the earlier look is modelled on military hardware. Big fire-control consoles with a small screen and lots of buttons.
  
  Reply
Rzah says:

2013/01/10 at 10:43

Actually, I disagree.
I think the computers from Aliens and 2001 are pretty good representations of exactly the sort of flight control computers that you might find in say the cockpit of a jumbo jet or the space shuttle, banks of lights screens and buttons are how you do things if you want your meatbags to quickly pick up on problems and fix them. If you wanted to compare consumer computing tech then I think 2001 nailed that as well with Dave’s iPad and a spoken interface for HAL.

I’m of the opinion that generally, on screen computers are moving further away from reality, because the goal stopped being to guess what computing will look like and more about showing loads of unlikely eye candy for the mouth breathers in the audience.

My guess is that In 20 years time there won’t be anything left to show anyway, in much the same way that older movies show people using phone boxes to make calls while modern movies sometimes don’t even bother showing the mobile a person is using, the idea of having a ‘place’ you went and sat at to perform computing will seem quaint.

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1. Hamranhansenhansen says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 13:47
  
  No, the cutting edge of interface is not eye candy. That is a canard. People have been saying it for decades and it has never, ever been true. The Mac was said to be wasting processing cycles showing WYSIWYG publishing views — turned out that was essential for apps like Photoshop. Yes, it also sometimes leads to a document with 17 typefaces in it. Can’t be helped.
  
  The cutting edge of interface design is you get rid of a box with hardware buttons on it, like an audio mixer, and you replace that with an iPad that runs the same audio mixer controls as software, as well as a software piano, guitar, drumkit, even album art design tools — whatever is appropriate to what you are doing. And the software apps improve over time via updates to add new features or fix old ones. And the iPad is mobile and wireless, so you can run the mixer from the music stand on the piano.
  
  The big plane cockpits all have iPads in them now. Some are flight manuals, saving weight, money, and trees. Some are running apps from the airplane maker, for example on Airbus 320 there is an iPad mounted for each pilot. Pilots don’t have desks for desktop computers, and don’t have lap space for laptops, so iPad makes sense for them.
  
  You have to be careful to burn off the Web and Web-heritage native apps before you look at the current state of interface design, because the Web is inherently hostile towards good interface design, and is a decade or more behind native apps on Apple platforms. If you have a Mac or iPad or iPhone, you will see many beautifully and thoughtfully designed apps that enable you to do 2–10 times more work per day with the same effort than with competing devices.
  
  If you want to see great modern interface design, look at GarageBand for iOS. It’s easy to see and use it at Apple Store. GarageBand is a songwriting app that morphs into whatever instrument you are writing at that time, whether piano, electric guitar, strings, drums. The sophistication of the interface is such that every instrument is actually truly playable, even using the device accelerometer to determine how hard notes are being struck (note velocity.) So instead of writing notes on a staff on paper, you play them into a recorder in your pocket and hear them back right away as real music, and your work is saved in a format that can be opened in professional music studios, where it can then be mixed and mastered and sold. And a key thing is GarageBand speaks to the user exclusively in music idiom, not in computer idiom. It is usable right away by any musician, even if 8 years old or 80. And there are accessories like Apogee MiC that just plug in and instantly work every time, to add microphones, guitar inputs, mechanical piano keyboards, whatever. GarageBand is a Stradivarius-level musical instrument, running as a software app on a touchscreen computer. It’s $5 and the iPad is $329 — that is competitive with musical instrument store products and pricing, even if all the iPad ever does is run GarageBand.
  
  Reply
  1. Nathan says:
    
    2013/01/10 at 14:58
    
    “The cutting edge of interface design is you get rid of a box with hardware buttons on it, like an audio mixer, and you replace that with an iPad that runs the same audio mixer controls as software,”
    
    I’m a semi-pro hobbyist and I have to comment here. You are mostly correct – there has been a massive rush towards software synths, software mixers, software effects, etc – but we haven’t completely got rid of the knobs and buttons yet.
    
    Now we have “control surfaces” – devices with unlabelled buttons and sliders and knobs that can be assigned on the fly to software effects or to virtual sliders – so we still get the tactile feedback and immediacy of a physical input, but the benefits of the software as well.
    
    Look at devices like the Monome, or popular control surfaces like the Mackie Control.
    
    Touchscreen buttons, sliders and knobs aren’t as good as the real thing. Not yet anyway.
    
    Reply
Raj Seshadri says:

2013/01/10 at 10:58

You should add the animation movie Final Fantasy: The Spritis Within (2001) – although an anime, it defined a very interesting future interface similar to minority report, but there were no screens – the keyboard and screen were holo-projected.

Also of note in the anime world is Ghost in the Shell (1992) which featured adaptations to humans (extra digits) for faster data entry – an interesting take on how to make interfaces more capable by making the inputting human more capable.

Ultimately, voice and non-tactile interfaces making the computers completely invisible will be the real future interface.

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preston says:

2013/01/10 at 11:02

A few extra comments based on some of the feedback I’ve been getting (and thanks – it’s been really interesting to see other thoughts on this) – for what it’s worth, I don’t actually see this as continuing to be how computer interfaces will evolve – more that there was that jump where computers (in a classic “computer” rather than “any device or appliance with a computer in it” sense) were portrayed on screen, be it in movies or TV

There’s probably a 5-10 year period ahead of us where computers will continue to be portrayed on screen in similar ways, but the real challenge to me seems that in a longer-term view the more likely computer interface available to humans will be increasingly via forms of augmented reality. As such, I think that’s going to be more difficult for movies and TV shows to accurately portray, and we may very well, as a few commentators have suggested, find ourselves in 30 years time giggling at how badly AR systems were portrayed.

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Dan Turner says:

2013/01/10 at 11:20

Interesting thoughts and good examples, but one thing I think you’re missing is that many of those physical representations of computers weren’t based on what we think of as personal (or even server) computing. Look at the cockpit of a commercial or military plane, medical equipment, or an old telephone exchange: those are examples of control surfaces for complex systems — that’s perhaps the way set and industrial designers were (not unreasonably) thinking of things like a medical bay control panel, or specialized flight controls.

Computers, as we relate to them today, are human-centric, general-purpose devices, and as such need flexible input and output designed around human modalities of interaction. In contrast, many of the examples you show are highly specialized, feature-on/feature-off devices.

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Jed says:

2013/01/10 at 11:45

This is a fascinating writeup; you make very good points about the shift over time.

But I think it’s not quite as clear-cut a progression as your discussion suggests; I think there are outliers at both ends of the spectrum. For example:

In early Star Trek: TOS episodes (1966), they interact with the ship’s computer through both a voice interface; it shows results on a terminal that looks vaguely like a dumb terminal. On the latter, the computer can display things like Mudd’s police record. There are certainly, as you noted, plenty of blinkenlights and unlabeled buttons in STTOS, but idea of asking the computer a question and having a screen on which you view search results (comprising both a photo and informational text) seems surprisingly modern to me (I suspect they based the general look more on a microfilm viewer than on a computer), and feels to me more like a software-interface focus than some of the hardware things you’re talking about. Though I may just be misunderstanding the distinction you’re making.

And at the other end of the spectrum, the current TV show Person of Interest features a powerful computer known as the Machine; certainly the Machine is a mix of super-software and peripherals (security cameras and other such inputs), but at least in the first couple episodes, they also showed shots of a big server room filled with hardware. I think in some sense the server room is the modern Hollywood equivalent of the old Hollywood room-sized blinkenlights computers and the intermediate Hollywood tape drives.

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1. Jed says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 11:46
  
  Oops, I meant to delete the word “both” in the phrase “both a voice interface.” Sorry for confusion.
  
  Reply
Jonathan Gibbs says:

2013/01/10 at 11:53

I just wanted to mention that the monitor graphics in Alien you said to look past were actually ground-breaking too. After Star Wars (1977) they were the first time actual computer graphics were used to represent computer screen content, and only the 4th film to ever use computer graphics at all. 10 years earlier for 2001, all the “monitor graphics” were not really computer graphics at all.

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David says:

2013/01/10 at 12:11

It isn’t what the director thought computers would look like in the future. It isn’t what the audience thought computers would look like in the future. It isn”t even about the future. The director had to get a point across: This thing here is a computer, and it’s a very powerful computer at that.

If the audience thought computers are suppose to have blinking lights, you put blinking lights on the sucker. If the audience thought computers were suppose to have buttons, load ‘em up with buttons. Remember the talking computer in the first Star Trek series? It had a monotone female voice, and always was saying “computing”. That way, I knew the captain was talking to a computer and not trying to pick up some random chick.

What we are seeing is not a prediction of the future, but a reflection of the present.

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Bookmarks for January 9th from 13:28 to 16:24 : Extenuating Circumstances says:

2013/01/10 at 13:02

[...] The changing face of computers on screen – Software, not hardware [...]

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Rand Careaga says:

2013/01/10 at 14:31

A close inspection of the “self-destruct” keyboard from Alien will reward the discerning viewer. The set designer was having his little joke.

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Sy says:

2013/01/10 at 14:52

Don’t forget that on Star Trek TOS, the computer also made a vauge “teletype machine” sound, since computer output in the 1960′s came from teletypes.

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Sajoto says:

2013/01/10 at 15:02

One note I’d make about the TARDIS having buttons and a non-qwerty keyboard well into the late 80s – and beyond – is that the designers of the set and props on that show have some rather unique challenges which do not face the makers of other sci-fi programmes, namely that the original TARDIS design was made in 1963. While they were able to rethink certain elements of the design to update it, they have to keep continuity with previous series.

This is why you can watch any episode of Doctor Who, all the way up to the 2012 Christmas special, and you will still see ‘old era’ buttons and flashing lights. And fans of this show wouldn’t have it any other way.

The other thing is that the TARDIS is completely alien technology, so it doesn’t necessarily follow the interface rules as human tech does. This also explains the non-qwerty keyboard – qwerty is 100% cultural.

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Crash lander says:

2013/01/10 at 15:41

Classic Science fiction (Asimov, Clarke) was blindsided by visual displays and non-voice interfaces. Interface technology developed with real world usage, and computers in films today reflect what designers see as an evolution of present trends. They are probably going to get blindsided by what comes next as well. I say this because of the uniformity of computer interfaces in films today… Multi-touch, gesture, and see-through screens/ holograms.

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1. Wade says:
  
  2013/01/10 at 16:07
  
  Writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Larry Niven thought of that. The “Mars” series has portable computing devices – and they get smaller and more powerful as the series progresses. Initially, they are much like large laptops. By the end of the series, they are wrist-mounted.
  
  Niven also thought of it. In “The Mote In God’s Eye”, he realized the society would, in fact, be hyper-connected and it would be inconsistent with the far future society he setup for someone to not be able to look up some random fact for the purposes of the plot.
  
  Reply
The limitations of today’s technology, and visions for the future of computing | Zack's Log says:

2013/01/10 at 16:20

[...] I was linked an article that really caught my attention since it’s about something that I think about all [...]

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Joshua says:

2013/01/10 at 17:24

I like where you mention the holdouts in IT. One major holdout in the creative industry is AVID with Media Composer. It looks like software from 20 years ago. Next to something like Final Cut Pro X (or 7), AVID looks incredibly archaic. They definitely haven’t yet got the picture.

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Stratum von Stein says:

2013/01/10 at 21:59

You’re forgetting the Iron Man movies, with Starks mixture of touch screen interfaces, numerous portable devices, real time movement of information (in form of graphics, video, etc) from one interface to the other, and an entire room of AR – type holographic UI. Personally, I found the Final Fantasy movie fascinating in the sense, that it portrayed portable holographic devices as the primary computing interface for Dr. Aki, and was blown away by how credible the same concept (old, I admit, but nevertheless fascinating) was shown in a movie with real actors (Iron Man).

On the other hand, if it comes to how computers might be in the future, I suggest Iain Banks Culture series, where hardware and bioware is interchangeable, and the interface is the brain, and the entire body, connected (willingly) to a massive datasphere.

Very readable article, thank you for your insights.

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Mister G says:

2013/01/10 at 23:01

Then again there is Apollo 13, based on a real event, involving a real spacecraft – and guess what – there are buttons and switches for “everything”. Need to tie in to the parachute batteries, if you dare, while using the LEM batteries to boost up the main ship in a way not particularly anticipated by the designers, but nonetheless feasible? Go for it! Need to get home a little sooner by firing the LEM descent engine while looking out the window — let’s see is the a switch for that, that doesnt require firing up all of that other stuff! It’s handled!

Spaceships should have lots of buttons for a reason – you never know when an electromagnetic pulse from that exploding neutron star is going to turn all of those fancy petabytes back to quicksand. Then what you gonna do? Buttons and switches and patchcords!! Yaaay!! They save the day. Who needs fancy communicators when you can improvise two tin cans and a string, or bang on the pipes – or its equivalent.

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1. SeanJA says:
  
  2013/01/11 at 07:50
  
  It doesn’t matter how many buttons you have, no power = no computer. No computer = no control of the rocket.
  
  Reply
Frans says:

2013/01/11 at 02:24

The most advanced computer on television is still the one of Blake’s Seven.
My favorite in the seventies.

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The changing face of computers on screen | Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp says:

2013/01/11 at 04:54

[...] The changing face of computers on screen Introduction When I first joined BHP IT Newcastle in 1996, I recall one of the senior managers there mentioning a recent TV interview he’d done for the local station. As I recall it, the inte… [...]

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ChrisL says:

2013/01/11 at 09:19

If you look closely at the console of the pod that Dave Bowman is sitting in in the 1968 release of 2001 you’ll see that it closely resembles the interior of a modern aircraft or military jet.

There is even the implication of touch screen interfaces by the way he’s reaching out with his finger to one of the displays.

Considering fully electronic cockpits with visual display interfaces didn’t come around till much, much later, I’d say Kubrick got this one spot on. It’s most accurate representation of the future that we can see to date and envisaged well before its time.

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Bob Buckingham says:

2013/01/11 at 09:54

“Total Recall”, the first one, had a computer in the home that worked simply by talking to it – no buttons, no lights.

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1. Russ says:
  
  2013/01/15 at 09:44
  
  Not a big fan of the remake of ‘total recall’ but I loved the concept in that where they had phones implanted in their hands so that whenever they touched a compatible surface, that became their interface.
  
  Fascinating article, thanks for the read.
  
  Reply
Irné Barnard says:

2013/01/11 at 15:38

You might look at this: http://www.reghardware.com/2013/01/07/papertab_flexible_monitor/

Check the video at the top, some of what’s done seems a lot similar to the ideas in Quantum of Solace.

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Movie UIs through the years | User experience design and usability in South Africa - Flow Interactive says:

2013/01/11 at 19:03

[...] Preston de Guise wrote a very interesting post on how Sci-Fi interfaces have changed over the years. He concludes as follows in The changing face of computers on screen: [...]

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Stefan Seidel says:

2013/01/11 at 19:36

I think there’s one important aspect missing here: All of these examples refer to computers which were mostly used for some kind of *work*. However, today most of our computers at work are fairly “90s” – keyboard, mouse, screen. The more modern computers (smartphones, tablets) are mostly used and mostly useful for private use – reading, surfing, etc. I don’t think it’ll neccessarily stay that way, though, touch and gesture interfaces may eventually come to the work place, too, but for now, the future isn’t here yet in this aspect.

And to think further about this, the next step for the personal (leisure, if you like) computing needs to be a greater social compatibility. Smartphones have a negative impact on our social interactions, and in order to keep the society sane, we need to find ways to alleviate that – all the possibilities of today’s smart devices are great, but there needs to be way that allows us to interact with them without impairing our interaction with other human beings.

Which is why, although today very present and very usable, voice interaction hasn’t taken off as much as some have imagined. Think about Star Trek – they talk to the computer, and all the other people in the room either silently watch or silently continue to use their touch interfaces. The reason is obivous – in a room of a certain size, only one voice input device can be used at a time, and if there are other people present, they are either involved in the interaction or annoyed. So imagine a work place where everyone uses voice input – not possible. Or a room full of people doing the great “Minority Report” style of work. I think it would be annoying as hell.

So as far as I see it, silent, small, efficient input methods will persist, and touch screens (or touch-able micro-projections) certainly have a great future, and keyboards (whether physical or on-screen) won’t go away completely in the next couple of years.

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Hollywood Computers | Brian Dusablon says:

2013/01/11 at 23:41

[...] Unsane — “The Changing Face of Computers On Screen” [...]

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AndrewJacksonZA says:

2013/01/11 at 23:56

About the Quantum of Solace table, have a look here at what Microsoft Research is doing:

Microsoft LightSpace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsG1BgZTNrk

A more general overview:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2020268/meet-microsoft-the-worlds-best-kept-randd-secret.html

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Sean Tubridy says:

2013/01/12 at 07:00

If you watch the pilot of the original Star Trek series, you’ll notice that some of the computer interfaces were more advanced and then later “dumbed down” for the actual series. In one scene, the character named Gary Mitchell opens the communications system simply by waving his hand across the console in front of him. Later on, Spock does the same to change views on a screen.

I wonder if they changed it because test audiences didn’t understand what was happening. Regardless, it was incredibly ahead of it’s time. We wouldn’t see this kind of computer interaction until 30 some years later.

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Kurt Thomas says:

2013/01/13 at 08:15

1) You may want to watch “Johnny Mnemonic”. Gesturing in the air is not as new as “Minority Report”.
2) If you read Vannevar Bush’s famous essay “As we may think”. It is all about what we today know as IT, but framed in analogue terms.

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Aktuelles 14. Januar 2013 — neunetz.com says:

2013/01/14 at 21:49

[...] The Changing Face of Computers on Screen [...]

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Rounded Corners 387 — Powerline | Labnotes says:

2013/01/15 at 01:42

[...] § The changing face of computers on screen. [...]

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Recommended Reading 6 | Chainsaw on a Tire Swing says:

2013/01/16 at 00:13

[...] The changing face of computers on screen “Eventually though, something significant started to happen with the representation of computers on-screen. This change profoundly demonstrated the evolving attitude of people towards these previously enigmatic devices.” [...]

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Internet adventures Series 2 Episode 1 | Euphiodesign says:

2013/01/17 at 10:02

[...] How the representation of computers on film and TV has changed:The changing face of computers on screen – Unsane [...]

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A evolução dos ecrãs de computador na ficção científica | Mundo Fantasma says:

2013/01/17 at 11:39

[...] Primeiro os computadores, mesmo os mais evoluídos, eram representados como hardware, essencialmente um conjunto de ecrãs, botões e luzes a piscar. Mais tarde e nos dias de hoje, são representados essencialmente pelo software, o hardware tornou-se em larga medida irrelevante. Unsane.info [...]

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Very Recent History: 23-Jan-13 | Inventing Interactive says:

2013/01/24 at 06:18

[...] The changing face of computers on screen is an interesting post on how computers have been portrayed in films — and the transition of them from physical objects with lots of buttons and controls to digital objects with touchscreens and gestures. “The human was typically portrayed as intruding on the computer rather than using the computer. None of which, of course, reflected where computers were actually heading.” [...]

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The changing face of computers on screen : Byronasaurus says:

2013/02/18 at 13:13

[...] “The changing face of computers on screen” [...]

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Movie UIs through the years says:

2013/03/11 at 16:41

[...] Preston de Guise wrote a very interesting post on how Sci-Fi interfaces have changed over the years. He concludes as follows in The changing face of computers on screen: [...]

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Introduction

The early years – The unfathomable future

The changing face

So what happened?

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