Untold thousands of people are responsible for the myriad components and software elements that make up your computer. Here are a few of them.
Eric Michelman, a member of Microsoftâs Excel team, was inspired to improve upon the frenetic mouse-clicking of arrows after watching users navigate spreadsheets. His first idea was what he called a âzoom leverâ to be manipulated by the userâs non-mouse hand. Microsoftâs hardware division expressed little enthusiasm for the invention, as zoom had minimal application beyond Excel. Some users of his prototype (which was made from a joystick) suggested the addition of a panning function, which Michelman added to a subsequent design. Eventually, the hardware division returned to him, stating that they had considered putting a wheel on a mouse, but didnât know what they might use it for. Michelman, with his research and development experience with the lever, had the solution .Â
There was a catch: Microsoft Hardware said theyâd only build the new wheeled mouse if he could get Office to support it. Michelman first convinced the Excel team to get onboard, and then Word, though the wheel would do different things in different applicationsâzoom in one and scroll in the other. After internal debate, it was decided to standardize the wheelâs function. By the time the revolutionary new mouse shipped, Michelman had recruited support from all of Microsoftâs major software teams, giving the design momentum enough to take over the industry.
If youâre not wheeling your way down this article, youâre probably sliding down it with a track pad. For that invention you can thank George E. Gerpheide, who despised computer mice and vowed to improve upon them. He named his invention âthe cat.â Apple was the first company to adopt it (sans name), incorporating it in the 1994 PowerBook laptop computer.
Wikimedia Commons  , CC BY 2.0  (Catmull) / iStock (3D man)
When the Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006, Ed Catmull became the head of both Disney Animation and Pixar. For all but the most attuned, Pixar seemed to come out of nowhere with the release of Toy Story , and itâs easy to think that Catmull was the businessman to John Lasseterâs filmmaker. While thereâs no question that Catmull is an astonishingly successful studio executive, thatâs just a small part of his astonishing resume. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah. His area of interest was 3D graphics, and his dream from childhood was to create the first feature-length animated film.Â
Before Catmull could satisfy his lifelong ambition, however, he first had to invent the technology necessary to do so. For his doctoral thesis, Catmull devised something called texture mapping, in which âphotographs can be âmappedâ onto patches thus providing a means for putting a texture on computer-generated pictures.â Today, texture mapping is used in one form or another in pretty much every 3D game, application, and film in existence. He also developed a type of spline-curve called the Catmull-Rom Curve (alongside Raphael Rom) and independently, the Z-Buffer, which helps determines what can be seen in a 3D rendering, and what is concealed. In short, a side effect of his efforts to make movies was the creation of every major form of modern entertainment.
Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0
The look-and-feel of your computerâs operating system is easily taken for granted. Of course the mouse pointer is a little arrow. Of course the disk is for saving files. Of course thereâs a clock when your computer is thinking. For every little detail that is obvious in hindsight, someone first had to invent it, design it, and draw it. One of the most successful such design pioneers is Susan Kare.
Kare joined Apple after completing her Ph.D. in fine arts at New York University. Her job was to design fonts and icons for the graphical user interface of a secret new computer called the Macintosh. The job was made doubly challenging in a pre-GUI world, in that most of the computing metaphors we know today didnât yet exist. In other words, she was not only inventing a major percentage of the look of computing, but also teaching the masses how to understand and use these powerful new machinesâusing only a handful of pixels to do so.
Her work isnât limited to the Mac. Chicago, one of the fonts she designed for the original Macintosh in 1984, was resurrected for Appleâs next big product, the iPod. She also worked for NeXT, Microsoft, and IBM, and designed everything from the solitaire deck and fundamental window elements in Microsoft Windows to the âlassoâ that is still part of Adobe Photoshop. As decades have elapsed, her metaphors are largely unchanged. Even as icons change for increasingly precise displays, the updates tend to be iterativeârevisions of her originals, in other words, as opposed to replacements.
When Intelâs Ajay Bhatt began his quest to reduce the needless complexity of cables and computer ports, the major vendors were leery. Keyboard, printers, displays, and mice (to name only four devices) each had their own cable and own types of ports. Such a system of wiring was âmore difficult than it needed to be,â he told CNN . His design for a new âuniversalâ port called for a fundamental rethinking of how computers and devices should interact, and would affect nearly every printer and peripheral on the market. But because the major computer vendors each had different customers, uses, and needs, a unified port standard was not an obvious move. "In order to be successful in anything like this you have to look at the problem from their perspective,â he said. âSo, if I went to, say, Compaqâwhich is now Hewlett-Packardâwe used to think about their issues and what problems they faced.â His six years of working with the industryâs key players paid off, however, and today there are over 10 billion USB devices on the market. The latest iteration of his design, called USB-C, is set to be the only port on the latest MacBook, replacing even the power cable.Â
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