> We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers. When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines.

Is this… right?

I thought some of the earliest mechanical computers (as opposed to human computers) that had much real uptake were “fire control computers,” for things like naval guns (for example). You move around dials and cranks to put the measurements in. I’d call this essentially graphical… it isn’t a series of text based commands that you issue, but a collection of intuitive UI elements, each of which is used to communicate a particular piece of data to the computer. Of course the GUI of the past was made of gages and levers instead of pixels, but that’s just an implementation detail.

I much prefer the command line to a gui, but I think we should call it what it is: an improvement. A much more precise and repeatable way of talking to the computer, in comparison to cranking cranks and poking dials. And a general, endlessly flexible channel that can represent basically any type of information, at the cost of not necessary being intuitive or glance-able.