Through a conjunctural analysis based on documentary sources, this investigation looks at the development of three forms of relationship between the computer and the human operator which emerged as the result of the processes by which the computer passed from wartime field devices used in the early 1940s to the distributed workflow of time-sharing computing of the early 1960s. The transit through these different processes allowed for the production of the computer as a cultural artifact, establishing the ways and means in which the operator and the computer became entangled in three distinct, yet deeply interrelated forms of relationship. The proxy relationship, which became produced through the usage of computerized apparatuses during WWII and posited the substitution of the human operator with the computer. The peer relationship, which required the digital general-purpose computer to become produced through its usage and posited the collaboration of the human and the computer, establishing each one as autonomous ontological entities, between who a dialogical relationship emerged. The partition relationship, which became effected through the incorporation of both, time-sharing computing and direct object manipulation, positing the existence of the operator and the computer not only as distinct ontological entities, but also residing in separate, irreconcilable worlds. The emergence, operation, and expansion of each of these relationships is studied and, in doing so, the conception of the human-computer interface is refocused as the result of the tensions and articulations of contradictory and coincident discursive and social practices. As such, the analysis posits that, although each of these three relationships developed within, through, and against specific contexts, they have not been abandoned in later computational developments but, instead, that they have become actualized and incorporated as facets of the human-computer interface.