We are grateful to the editors for this series, as it encourages us to reflect on the past, and to understand that technological miracles do not spring fully-formed from the minds of researchers. More typically, they arise from the thoughts and inspirations and long nights of effort from many who have worked in human-computer interaction (HCI) in the past. As this series shows, the interplay among past scholars and researchers can often be represented by timelines portraying different strands of development or thought.

Because our work (variously called “human-computer interaction”, “interaction design”, and “knowledge media design”) has transformed the way human beings access and create knowledge, learn, think, communicate, and collaborate, we must record and understand our history. By gathering original sources, we can produce accurate, rich, and nuanced accounts of the intellectual history of our field. This is urgent because our opportunity to talk to and record the experiences of many who made seminal contributions is limited…