ABSTRACT
It is, perhaps, not well known that Allen Newell began his career with studies of human-computer interaction. Today the topic of the studies would be called “Computer Support for Cooperative Work.” Typically for Newell, these studies were on a grand scale. Done at RAND and the Systems Development Corporation, the studies involved many people simultaneously engaged in cooperative work over computer links. One practical result was the SAGE air defense system. Another result was his realization with Herbert Simon that the computer could be used, rather in the manner of differential equations in physics, to reason analytically from modeled local behavior to global consequences. Newell's main interest became the technical nature of mind. His main method became applying the new insights emerging from computer science about the nature of information processing, the nature of computation, and the nature of architecture to that problem. But he started from human-computer interaction.
