These days we use the word dashboard for a couple of things – cars, and techy things with lots of displays and buttons, which I’m reliably informed by the internet are called graphical user interfaces (GUIs). So you might think it’s quite a modern word. In fact dashboards pre-date cars by a good 40 years*, first appearing in print in 1842. Hold on to your hats – let’s find out what put the ‘dash’ into ‘dashboard’.
The word ‘dashboard’ originally referred to a protective board or barrier at the front of a horse-drawn carriage. It was there to stop passengers being covered in crap thrown up by horses' hooves as they, you guessed it, dashed.
When cars turned up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the design used lots of elements from horse-drawn carriages (except for the horses, obviously), which included the dashboard. Initially it had the same function i.e. as a crap barrier, but as cars got more and more complicated (and got windows), the dashboard evolved to include various instruments and controls like the speedo, fuel gauge and so on (you know what a dashboard looks like). And we then started using the term to refer to that whole instrument panel.
In the mid-20th century, as computers and digital displays became the norm, the term expanded to include those GUIs I mentioned earlier, that display information and controls in one place. Cool, right?
*The first ‘proper’ automobile is widely attributed to Karl Benz (he of Mercedes-Benz fame), a German engineer and inventor. He developed and built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1885, getting a patent for it a year later. It’s considered the world's first true automobile because it was designed to be powered by an internal combustion engine. Obviously there were lots of other experiments and prototypes that came before it though.