From Tool to Partner

Jonathan Grudin connected to computer history on a school field trip, when he played blackjack against a huge computer at Battelle Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps a vacuum tube had burned out. The computer claimed to have won when it had not, convincing Jonathan that computers were impressive but not infallible. While in high school, he taught himself to write programs, enter them on punch cards, and run them on a nearby college's sole computer, unused in the evenings and on weekends. His first program found twin primes; his second constructed random bridge hands. Jonathan majored in mathematics-physics at Reed College and obtained an M.S. in mathematics at Purdue University. After working as a programmer at Wang Laboratories and Stanford University, he obtained a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, working with Don Norman at the University of California, San Diego and spending two of his summers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. During a two-year postdoc at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, he conducted his first human-computer interaction studies with Phil Barnard and Allan MacLean. He returned to work as a software engineer at Wang Laboratories and team leader at the artificial intelligence-oriented Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation consortium in Austin, Texas. From 1989 to 1991, he was a visiting professor at Aarhus University. His first exploration of the field's history, in the library next to his office, was to determine the origin of the waterfall model of software development. From 1992 to 1998, he was a professor of information and computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He spent six-month sabbaticals at Keio University and the University of Oslo. In 1998, he joined Microsoft and became an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Information School. Jonathan is an ACM Fellow and member of ACM SIGCHI's CHI Academy. He has participated in CHI and CSCW since their first conferences. His CSCW 1988 paper on the challenges in designing technology to support groups won the first CSCW Lasting Impact Award in 2014.