The history of interface design is fairly young.
I always find it fascinating reading documents from the beginning of the product design discipline. John D. Gould and Clayton Lewis landmark paper in 1985(!) titled "Designing for Usability", is great example of this.
In it, they elaborated on three key principles that later became the foundation of Human Computer Interaction: early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement, and iterative design. Since then many books have been published with essentially the same message!
An interesting story from the paper is from Wang Laboratories; while developing a text-editor they wrote a user manual in the early design stages in order to get feedback from potential customers.
