An unlikely HCI frontier: the social security administration in 1978

This inaugurates a series of guest-authored Timelines columns. Richard Pew's research focus has been in human factors. He was the program chair for the first official CHI Conference in 1983 and participated on three panels at CHI'86. He was president of the Human Factors Society and the first chair of the National Research Council Committee on Human Factors. He wrote the HCI history chapter for the first edition of the Erlbaum Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, edited by Julie Jacko and Andrew Sears. In this column he describes an innovative project in the dynamic late 1970s that brought Xerox PARC technology to a government bureaucracy.---Jonathan Grudin, Timelines editor