ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards’ Curing Those Uncontrollable Fits of Interaction, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. Curing Those Uncontrollable Fits of Interaction was the seminal paper on Expect, a software tool for automation of other software. The Expect software itself was a solution to a long-standing problem: how to automate software designed to be operated by a human. Many software applications have control languages, preferences, settings, and other mechanisms for providing automated control. Macros are just one modern example of such programmability. However, before Expect each application used a different such language, if any. This meant that users had to learn lots of languages, one for each application. And in many cases, languages were quite limited or totally nonexistent.
