Taking the environmental policy simulations of the 1970s as a starting point, this article looks at the history of interactivity in computer simulation. It argues that the move toward interactive interfaces for computer simulations in this period was motivated as much by the anxieties of model-builders as it was by the new technological affordances offered by time-sharing. By looking at the early history of interactive simulations, the article shows that scholarly representations of simulations as innately “seductive” and “captivating” overlook how these properties were deliberately engineered into software for historically-specific reasons.
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