Almost 50 years of the University of Michigan human factors engineering summer conference

In 1957 Paul Fitts and Daniel Howland offered a human factors summer course at Ohio State University. Fitts moved to Michigan in 1958, and the next year he offered essentially the same course in Ann Arbor. The course has been given every summer since then. An estimated 3500 students from a diverse set of industries and countries have completed one or two weeks of the course. The list of lecturers includes many of the leaders who have shaped the field of Human Factors Engineering (HFE), and the course has gradually morphed from focusing on operators working with traditional hardware systems first to users of interactive computer systems and now to complex systems that incorporate computers and people ubiquitously. This paper will trace this history and comment on a few of the inevitable anecdotes that go with 50 years of experience.