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The Real History of the GUI
Big Nothing writes "Mike Tuck @ webmasterbase.com has written a piece on the development of GUIs. Like most other articles on webmasterbase.com it is fairly non-technical, but entertaining nonetheless." Update: 08/21 02:45 AM GMT by T : Note that the link above takes you to the print-friendly version of the story; for online reading, you might prefer this version instead.
There's a good collection of these kinds of things at Computer Stupidities on rinkworks.com.
Should I read the article or send a first-post? I am not sure?
I should read the article first, then send a post.
No! I cannot resist. Anyway...
This is GUI!
Repeal the DMCA!
Good write up.
/me: bookmarks for PHBs of the world in need of history lesson.
Am I the only one reminded of the PBS 'Revenge of the Nerds' history of silly valley? I think it was PBS that did it; came out a couple years ago.
Regardless, I think I'll go whack myself on the head with a big rock.
-- RLJ
Bring on the telepathic interface, baby!
For a second there I thought it said "Mike Tuck @ webmasturbate.com". Of course, if that were the case I guess the title would have been "The Real History of the Gooey".
For someone who knows so much about GUIs, you'd wonder why the tiny font on the page is completely illegible.
How can any history of the GUI be complete without Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set?
fine, you click on the "Information" link and see where it takes you.
|---------------|
practically an AC
Once upon a time, way back in the Stone Age, lived two cavemen, Ugh and Glug.
Actually, the two cavemen were named "Ugh" and "Slug."
I hope this clears things up a bit for everyone.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Nice to see they mentioned the good ol' Atari ST! I managed to get one a couple years back and it's quite possibly the coolest antiquated piece of technology I own today, and the GUI is very, very impressive for the time. It works, (although finding discs for the 720k floppy drive is a pain in the ass) and has one of the best versions of Monopoly available today, not to mention that the OS is just as stable as Win98, and about 1/500th the size. Yeah, yeah, it doesn;t support everything, but then again, who wants a USB printer on a 16-year-old machine?
/* extreme sarcasm */. . . . .
Just need to figure out a hack to hook it into my network now
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
The world would be a better place if GUIs had never been invented.
Give me an Xterm, emacs and lynx over a point-and-slobber interface anyday.
Jesus christ, people. It was called Triumph of the Nerds, OK? Triumph!
* the first GUIs were written in smalltalk.
*smalltalk was the first cross platform portable bytecode language
* smalltalk is good pure OO unlike C++ (not pure OO) and Java (not good OO - the class hierarchy is a monster - ST's object heirarchy is much more clean)
I can't stand articles on technical subjects that include gibberish about "cave men" and the like. Who-needs-it? Obviously, the author is padding for his lack of knowledge about the subject.
come on everybody knows al gore invented the first gui!
I was going to rip this article a new one, but i'm glad they got it right. What I would consider to be the first GUI was Sutherland's "Sketchpad" system from the early 60's. The military had similar sorts of things predating Sutherland, but nothing quite flexible enough to really be called a full blown GUI.
Anybody with their brains in the right place can tell you that the GUI was not invented by Xerox PARC. They may have done a great deal to push the idea, or perhaps simply been at the right place at the right time, but the basic idea of using graphics as a means to interact with a machine predates PARC by about 20 years.
If you really wanna have some fun, check out Doug Englebart's 1968 presentation that introduced the world to the mouse, chordboard and other interesting stuff. There are plenty of links to it, but here's a good one incase you cant find any. A while back, there was a site that offered his entire presentation in RealVideo format, IIRC..I wish someone would post a link to it, or perhaps a better (re: DivX, or straight MPEG) link... It almost brings tears to my eyes when I watch it.
Bowie J. Poag
[random thoughts]
The GUI became popular because it really made most things that users need to do on a computer far easier than cryptic command lines. For years GUI's have been refined for ease of use. We're now coming to the limit of current icon-oriented design. There's just so many ways that an icon-based system can be presented to the user before usability starts going into the toilet.
We moved to GUI's because command line interfaces only got us so far, and some day someone will come up with a better-than-icon based system that is more logical. We'll all say "gosh, why didn't I think of that?" and everyone will jump into the "new way" of thinking.
I have visions of time-oriented interfaces that respond to "get me the spec sheet for the network I did last week sometime" and "set a new meeting for next Tuesday with Jim and Bob in the conference room". These new interfaces will be able to store and retrieve information based upon how we think, not in the traditional tree-like-structures we're currently used to. The concepts behind OO/RDBMS systems have some potential, such as nested tables and object oriented models, but don't present their information to a user very easily.
I don't see new interfaces becoming popular until they target the non-computer user market. I envision voice-activated systems, but they tend to be annoying to other people around. Mouse navigation doesn't seem to be viable because of it's limited 2D space, and thus the 2D GUI. The 3D systems (see spaceball on google) look neat, but aren't very intuitive to users. We may wind up with virtual filing cabinets, but hopefully we'll stay away from the Packard Bell Navigator!
Is there anyone (university or other) that is working on a new interface concept? I'd be interested in hearing what works and what doesn't. I know M$ and (Cr)Apple invest millions into GUI research, so I wouldn't be surprised if we saw something new out of those camps in the next few years.
And no, I don't count XP's "new and improved" GUI anything more than an over-hyped icon-based system.
[/random thoughts]
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I prefer a decent command-line interface within an ergonomic GUI, i.e. best of both worlds. Windows definitely benefits from the addition of this . The shortcomings of the Windows CLI never cease to astound me. For instance, a command-line is not very functional without a decent egrep-like tool, IMHO.
It's amazing to see how so many beautiful and wonderful things happened as a result of two guys in the backseat of a car.
Wait a minute...
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
The statement that X is an OS underscores the author's feeble grasp on the subject matter.
You can never equivocate too much.
I'd like to point out Netscape's rather interesting history of GUI browsers. It starts of showing how some of the founders of Mosaic went on to found Mosaic Communications Corporation which was later renamed to Netscape. It then covers Microsoft IE and the decision to start the Mozilla project which is producing the next generation of Netscape browsers as well as others.
OK, I've heard this quote a lot, and while it's hilarious, I have a sixth sense that says Bill Gates never actually said it.
Now, I've spoken to people who were there to hear, firsthand, Bill at a big computer show (SIGGRAPH?) in the early 90s, remark that "it's impossible to write a preemptive multitasking OS that runs in less than 4MB RAM" - while there were computers on the show floor doing precisely that. But that's not quite the same quote, and though I can imagine it evolving over the years to "640K oughta be enough" I just don't think that's what happened.
Any ideas? Anyone know where the quote supposedly appeared?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
While Ug and Glug were discussing the finer points of GUI design, I'm sure Oog the Open Source Caveman was deriding them :)
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Out of curiousity, what is the site itself generally about? I thought it was a mainstream media site, but now I see there is a bit of complex coding discussed.
but at least they hacked up a link to the unofficial apple museum... their link was Like this
Here's the 'cleaned-up' link from me: Enjoy
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
The way they tell it in Pirates of Silicon Valley is much more exciting. *cough*
My sigs always suck.
I remember being asked to set up a router for a dot-com a few years back. They were dead set on using Windows NT and two nics. The MS front end to the router had a very complex gui which had stupidly cute icons which:
/etc/gateways.
"My Network Router"
Which of course could be opened to see:
"My Network Routing Table."
God, what I wouldn't have given for vi and
this space intentionally left unwitty
Well, I beg to differ. You could say I've kind of been enlightened after listening to the epitome of computer cluelessness: my mother.
She was struggling with the Windows explorer GUI, trying to move a file. And then, she said, and I'm not kidding: "Oh, I prefered DOS, you know, you typed a command, and it worked!"
Maybe what simplicity is really about, is determinism in the way the computer behaves?
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
All your webmasterbase.com are belong to us!
My other sig is extremely clever...
Try this. I'd really like to see more integration between the GUI and the CLI though. OS X does a few nice things, like letting you drag a file into a terminal to insert a path, and letting you pipe to the clipboard so you can just paste into a GUI program. But that doesn't really go far enough. I'd like a field in every file manager window where I can type CLI commands and have them executed in that directory. There should be a few extra commands too, so I could do things like 'select *.zip' to select all the .zip files in the window.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Give me some real tech stuff. If you want to speak in caveman langugage, buy yourself a time travel module and send yourself to the stone age. We are living in the 21st century here.
My mother made the same complaint. She was a touch-typist, after all, and hated having to move her hands away from the keyboard to use the fscking mouse.
I remember when MacOS System 7 (code named Blue) came out (91, 92 or so, I forget when) there were parallel OS teams, working on Pink and Red. Pink was supposed to be near term ideas, a brand new OS based on Object technologies. Red was supposed to be long term groovy stuff, really whizbang.
Now close to 10 years later MacOS 9 is obviously an updated and freshened Sys 7 with no cutting edge stuff (where is OpenDoc and Cyberdog), Taligent a distant memory, and Red never heard from again. Microsoft must have similar killed R & D (you think Bob was the only GUI idea they ever came up with, it's just the one you know about). What ideas are lurking someplace needing a better processor and some code spit and polish?
Cut the ST some slack, man! It can't be that bad.
Oh, wait...you meant that as a compliment : )
That article was stupid..I stoped reading it after that "ugh" crap, and the rest of the article I saw in Pirates of Silicon Valley. You know you saw it to.
I'm glad someone mentioned the military. I was in the Army in the 80's. I remember testing the Apple II and Windows 286, and GEM. I also remember using an GUI ordering system. And lets not forget about Wang. The Wang VS system had a simple GUI - well it was half text based and half GUI - sort of. lol
One line that I found interesting in the article:
Like the Amiga, the ST couldn't compete with the big boys, nor with Amiga for gamers, but its sophisticated sound capabilities earned it a niche with audio editors and musicians.
In reality the sound on the Atari ST was somewhat subpar and it was seriously outmatched by the Amiga (note that I was a massive Atari ST fan so I'm not biased when I say that...The ST ran at 8Mhz whereas the lowly Amiga only ran at 7.14!). What they are probably referring to is that the Atari ST, in a very odd piece of design, had a MIDI in and out port on it (no thru though) which single-handedly catapulted it in the upper echelon of PCs for electronic musicians. Pretty silly really as you could inexpensively add MIDI to most other PCs, but in a strange twist of events rather than making musicians buy the ST, it made lots of ST owners musicians (or at least wannabe musicians with their Casio SK1 in tow)...
The world would be a better place if these luxuries had never been invented.
Give me a box of punch cards, or even ED, over a type-and-slobber interface anyday.
*** Clue to original poster: if it weren't for the GUI, the PC market as it is today wouldn't exist, and you'd still be paying $5000 for a 486. Also, if the GUI didn't exist, GNU/Linux users wouldn't get to gloat about their imagined skills, because they would have to compete with really complex operating systems.
--
I like to watch.
The GUI is a tool, just like the CLI is. It's a tool that works if it is done right, and once a tool is done right, theres very little to no reason to reinvent it.
The "Classic" MacOS GUI works very well, yea maybe it's ripped off from Xerox, but whatever, it works. It's not themeable (well kinda...) but in the System 7 and OS 8 versions it was simple and it worked very well. So well that 3 year olds and 80 year olds could master the interface quickly and without help.
Aqua is just a step beyond the "Classic" GUI and with some refinement it could last another 20 years.
However...I do not agree that a new interface concept is needed. A screwdriver's interface has remained unchanged for centuries and it doesn't need a new concept. Same with the firearm, a Beretta flintlock from 1300 had the same interfact characteristics as a Beretta Gold Sable rifle made in 2001.
When a concept works...don't spend the effort on changing it. Spend the effort on making the OS run better behind the interface.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
There will always be first posts on slashdot, unless nobody posts a comment.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
The irony of this article, and all the articles it links to is NO PICTURES.
Not even the history of computer graphics article has any pictures. You'd think that was a sure bet.
Amigas preferred 880K formatting. They didn't have to put a gap between each sector, who hoo!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Since this Israeli company is trying to get rid of Windows, then we won't have a GUI anymore. We'd have a SUI (Speaking User Interface). Since Sooey sounds like a farm animal call or an oriental dish, it can't be used for geek-speak. Therefore we must abandon all research towards making computers talk to us since it will never be adopted by the geeky ones.
<html> <body> </body> </html>
(That's articles, front page, anything.)Was it just a fluke? Or should I suggest that he send an HTML 4.0 compliant webpage as the default, since I'm sure that would work just fine? (If he's sensing browser types. ;)
He refers to X as an OS, it is not an Operating Sytem - it's a Graphical Environment (and even that's putting it simple).
Also, Windows/386 - which was a full 32-bit version of 2.0 was the first Windows to take advantage of the 80386's features. He states that Windows 3.0 was, although it was actually an enhancement to W/386 that dropped support for the 80286 and relied exclusively on 32-bit mode.
He also skipped right over IBM LanManager, which was the precursor to OS/2.
OK, enough nitpicking... I guess the Ugh and Grub or what-have-you got to me more than I thought.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
About this time last year, I saw a video clip of the NLS Demonstration (the one that used hyperlinks, object addressing, and videoconferencing all wrapped in a purty GUI way back in 1968). Has anyone else seen it? And if you have, do you have a link to it?
It's already here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/pinealweb/
2 finger gesture jokes aside :D
:D
More gesture controls need to be added (sure, we have drag n plop but we need more, maybe to aid accessability too)
Whats the gesture for reboot?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
So PARC didn't invent the GUI. They didn't invent OO programming either, nor networking. However, they were the first to demonstrate a workinggeneral purpose GUI, the first to build real applications using OO techniques, and the first to build a working high speed LAN. Plus, they integrated all these into a single system, essentially inventing the "workstation", and they put these systems into production long before the Lisa & Mac were released.
Back in the early-mid '80s, employees across Xerox were collaborating on email, memos, project schedules, and presentations with people across the country in a GUI environment using Star workstations on the Xerox WAN. Meanwhile, the rest of the business world was stuffing 360k floppies into green screen IBM PCs. Xerox was pioneering the use of groupware internally almost 15 years before it caught on in the PC world with the release of Lotus Notes.
Too bad the upper management at Xerox failed to recognize the potential market. Otherwise, most of us would be using UNIX boxes running Star/ViewPoint and coding in SmallTalk instead of using PCs running Windows and coding in C/C++.
Unless it was a quickly discarded feature in AmigaOS 1.0 - 1.1, I'm pretty sure it never existed at all.
I have to agree it was sad that Amiga didn't catch with the masses. Long live emulation! :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I agree, it was definitely informative. Best line:
Hey, that's us!! :)
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Actually the first version of Windows that wouldn't run on a 286 was Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Windows 3.11 and Windows 3.1 for Workgroups run fine on a 286 (and you can even get Netscape 2.0 going on it....)
Where did all those licensed copied of this archaic software go, anyway??
Some criticisms for you:
" So PARC didn't invent the GUI. They didn't invent OO programming either, nor networking. However, they were the first to demonstrate a workinggeneral purpose GUI, the first to build real applications using OO techniques, and the first to build a working high speed LAN."
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. All three of PARC's supposed "innovations" were being done in the late 1950's and early 1960s. The first general-purpose GUI popped up around that time. So did "real applications using OO techniques", and "a working high speed LAN"... You're high on crack if you think PARC had anything to do with inventing any of these. Sure, they used them, but they had been around for years, and in some cases, decades.
"Back in the early-mid '80s, employeail, memos, project schedules, and presentations with people across the country in a GUI environment"
So was I. I had an Amiga and an email address in 1985
"Xerox were collaborating on email, memos, project schedules, and presentations with people across the country in a GUI environment"
Groupware was being done in the mid 1960s. Teleconferencing even. Again, google for Doug Englebart, and "human augmentation lab" if you're bored.
I don't mean to rub your nose in it or anything.. its just your facts are way, way off.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
First, and foremost, you can tell this person is an obvious mac lover. I wonder about his version of the Microsoft side of the story--especiall since when I click on the Microsoft timeline link I get "Sorry, there is no Microsoft.com web page matching your request". Granted, Microsoft does move stuff around a lot, but I thought this article was written recently. Either way, his version of the Microsoft sides sounds too close to the mac worshipers version. I definately skiptical about this. I don't think this author investigated the Microsoft side as much as should have been done to present this article. As far as I am concerned, this is just another Apple Mac raise peice. I see to many possiblities for mistakes.
I will give the author credit for the SmallTalk stuff. I am just not sure of the Microsoft stuff he is saying. I am no big fan of Microsoft, but this article smells fishy.
I am sure I will get trolled for this, but you have to admit that since his link to the one Microsoft webpage doesn't work, makes you wonder about the rest of his sources.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
So is choice in which desktop environment a good thing or a bad thing? At least according to this guy, it's not exactly in the same league as sliced bread.
While X was a well-written and easily handled GUI, it never settled on a particular "look and feel," and as a result at least three different X interfaces floated around; this was probably not the main reason why X never caught on much outside the UNIX community, but certainly was part of the explanation. X is still a viable graphical environment today, and has a relatively small but vocal following.
So what are we to make of this? Is this history repeating itself? I'm torn, personally. While I think choice is great (and needed), a common "default" interface, libraries, and inter-application messaging system sure would make X Window a lot simpler for the average person to adopt.
load "linux",8,1
Hi all,
I wrote that article. Thanks for your replies -- many of you have written me personally to correct me on one point or another. I'm in the process of writing an errata/addendum to the original article to make corrections, clarify hazy statements, etc. etc. etc. Hopefully SitePoint/Webmasterbase will print the addendum soon.
Some of what will be fixed include:
-- the fact that X is not an OS, but merely an interface (I knew that, but I didn't state it very clearly)
-- the non-Xerox origin of Simula-67
-- Q-DOS is not, of course, a programming language, but an operating system. Major typographical goof
-- lots of info on Jef Raskin, including his claim that he came up with the idea of an all-graphical interface as early as 1967
By the way, the whole "caveman" motif, and the tone of the article in general, comes from my predisposition for presenting technical information in a way that non-technical readers can understand and enjoy. I do the same thing on my Windows resource site. I could have easily dumped the whole Ugh and Glug (or Ugh and Slug, LOL) bit and written the article in a much more technical fashion, but while that would have made the cognoscenti happier, it would have left the rest of the readership in the dust. Also, I am not a Mac fan (I'm strictly Wintel, for better or worse), and though I did see "Pirates of Silicon Valley," I could see plenty of errors and sensationalism in the piece, and did not refer to it in any way for the article.
Again, thanks for all the input.
At last, somebody actually gets this right:
"Apple negotiated a deal with Xerox; in return for a block of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his team to tour PARC, take notes, and implement some of the ideas and concepts being bounced around at PARC in their own creations."
Pirates seriously messed with history in this regard, having never touched on the deal Jobs made with Xerox, and the made-up commentary by the "Wozniak" character.
But on the downside, the author doesn't spell Jef Raskin correctly.
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
The author got the timeline wrong. Mac people didn't start abandoning the Mac when Apple made the 150 million $ deal with microsoft. They did it in 1995-96 when Apple was having insane quality control problems or in 99 when Steve killed the mac clones. The Mac people interrest in alternative OSes grew in 97-'98 when Apple was really into clonners. The BeOS was being built for most powerPCs and clones and later came Linux. When Apple nuked the clonners many were so pissed they tried to switch to the BeOS, but found the platform was dead without any hardware to run on (Apple has stopped Be from running its OS on new macs and BeOS for intel was still months away or had no software). Linux was a nice alternative and merging the mac refugees with the DOS refugees (who couldn't compute without some sort of shell) there begat Linux.
The Truth with a capital 'T' ... and it gets modded to -1.
Doug Engelbart's NSL demo is absolutely amazing, like the introduction to The Outer Limits: Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.
t reaming.mov
m ov
s Streaming.mov
s .mov
x xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Here is the classic video of Doug Engelbart demonstrating NLS, on my streaming quicktime server. It's from "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57).
Streaming version (loads quickly, allows random access, may not work through firewalls):
http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgetsS
Non-streaming version (plays as it loads, 24 megabytes):
http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgets.
The online video consists of some excerpts from All The Widgets (the original tape is at least an hour long and surveys all kinds of widgets, most pretty repetitive and boring). The first half of the online video consists of a bunch of pie menu demos that I developed and recorded in the 80's, followed by Doug Engelbart's NLS demo near the middle, and the credits for All The Widgets at the end.
My thoughts on the article were that it was good, but missed a whole lot of important stuff. The space wasted on fictional cave-man stories would have been better spent discussing actual early research that the article ignored.
For an excellent classic summary of many important graphical user interfaces that had a lot of influence, I highly recommend "Methodology of Window Management", Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK; FRA Hopgood, DA Duce, EVC Fielding, Kenneth Robinson, AS Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, (1986). No longer in print, but you might find it used or in a good library. It includes some wonderful papers about many important gui systems that weren't mentioned in the article, like James Gosling's original article on "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system" (which Sun later renamed "NeWS", that I used to implement the pie menus shown in the video, and out of whose ashes arose a popular language called "Java").
I've published a bunch of my own user interface related demos as streaming quicktime videos on my server. Here's the front page with a link to the index. (The index is an XML file using a style sheet, which Mozilla still doesn't understand, unfortunately.)
http://www.lushcreations.tv
If you're interested in gui design, I would recommend the demo of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims:
http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenu
http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenu
-Don
PS: There is still a bug in SlashDot and/or the IE textarea with the WRAP="VIRTUAL" attribute, that causes long words (like URLs) to have spaces inserted into them, so the text of the URLs above is split with unwanted spaces. The actual HREF links seem to be ok though. Here is what I mean -- the following should be 80 "x" characters, but instead comes out as 50 "x"'s, a space, and 30 more "x"'s:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Perq's were invented in a garage in Pittsburgh around 1978/1979. They were duking it out with Sun-1s and Sun-2s for a long time (better graphics, not as much funding or engineering talent).
Q /
For info:
http://perqlogic.com/rdd/PERQ.html
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/PER
http://vonhagen.org/perq-gen-faq.html
Someone else mentioned it in this comment.
Also, how about some mention of GEOS?
Oh, and the infamous Bill Gates "640K" quote: Bill claims he never said it, but some people posted saying it came from the DOS 3.0 manual. Unfortunately, I don't know where you could find a copy in order to check it.
1) Using Explorer navigate to the directory of the source folder.
2) Click to select the file or files that you want to move or copy.
3) Press CTRL-C or CTRL-X to choose to copy or move the files respectivly.
4) Using Explorer navigate to the desired destination directory
5) Press CTRL-P.
Done
http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/XXengel200.ram
..... ATTENTION!
..... ATTENTION!
/. ?
ATTENTION!
Replace 'XX' in the above url for '01' to '35' to see the respective bits of video that the demonstration is made off.
ATTENTION!
Enjoy!!! It's fascinating!
p.s- who sad I don't put good information on
Anonymous Coward
p.p.s - go to http://www.anarchistfaq.org and educate yourselves
p.p.p.s - ups, that last post-script just blew it...pretend it isn't there
p.p.p.p.s - never mind that, just go check those videos, now!!
The "640K" quote is definitely a source of debate. I'll acknowledge that it may be apocryphal.
The Alto itself didn't really have a GUI. What it had were graphical applications. One of them was Smalltalk, which had its own private windowed environment. Another was Bravo, the first WYSIWYG multi-font editor. You could write other applications yourself, in Mesa, Xerox's own language, or BCPL, in which the underlying tools were written. The underlying environment was a single-task command line environment comparable to early DOS.
Bravo was used as the programmer's editor. The internal representation of Bravo documents was ASCII text, followed by a control-Z, followed by the formatting information. The command-line tools, which understood control-Z as EOF, could thus happily process Bravo documents. Programs for the Alto were normally written in proportional fonts, with boldface and italics as needed.
The Alto hardware itself was built by Data General under contract to Xerox. It was basically a Data General Nova with custom microcode in a desk-height rackmount case containing the computer and a 14" removable disk cartridge drive (equivalent to a DEC RK05, if anybody cares.) The display, a portrait-mode b/w full-page display built at PARC, was the main hardware innovation, along with the 3MB Ethernet and the mouse.
The Alto project had several components. First was the concept of a number of single-user workstations connected by a network providing dedicated services. Each Alto had very limited disk space, but file servers were available. All serious storage was on the file server. There was also a print server, an Alto connected to a modified Xerox copier. PARC management was working on the assumption that, although all this was far too expensive to deploy, in time the hardware would get cheaper and it would be useful. They were right. The fact that they then blew the business aspect wasn't PARC's fault.
The other big push was Alan Kay's Dynabook. Kay was big on simulation and teaching kids to use computers. His real direction for Smalltalk was what we today disparaginly call "edutainment", games with educational intent. This seems strange now, but that's where he was going. He's continued with that direction, at the Media Lab and elsewhere. But it never took off.
PARC tried to commercialize the technology as the Xerox Star. This wasn't a general-purpose system; it was more like a really good dedicated word processor. Wang then ruled that market, with what was called "shared logic word processing", dumb terminals all running one common application on a time-shared host. This was cheap enough offices could afford it.
The Star, with a real computer at every desk, a big display, and a LAN, did roughly the same function, but at higher cost. It was cool, but didn't sell. It was a closed system; you ran the Star app, and that was it. PARC didn't trust the users to mess with the system, so you couldn't do anything they hadn't anticipated.
The computer scientists at PARC didn't see that the future was open systems running unreliable software. Really. That was the missed vision. Nobody dreamed that something like DOS, let alone non-protected mode multitasking, would end up in clerical offices. Obviously, it would break all the time, files would get lost, and the cost to the organization would be enormous. Remember, Xerox was a rental company back then; if the copier broke, it was Xerox's problem. So they took reliability very seriously. And, sadly, it cost them.
no one got it
When is adequacy gonna be back BTW? That was quickly rising the chart of my favorite sites.
nigger
Several clarifications/nits:
7
- It's Smalltalk, not SmallTalk - see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/squeak/message/3193
- It's not made clear that Digital / DEC / Digital Equipment Corp. which was involved in / helped fund the research that led to X is not the same company as Digital Research (from whence both CP/M and GEM came (& How many people remember the PC version of THAT ?))
- I don't see any mention of SUN's "Starfire" research project from the early/mid '90's which explored some interesting GUI ideas along the way. Doesn't seem to be much info online other than where to buy the book/video (http://www.asktog.com/starfire/starfireHome.html ). Of course, it's not just a GUI but a design philosophy so that might explain its' ommission.
The following are real telephone dialogs when I worked as a tech support in IBM:
.....sorry about that, but would you tell me what exactly on the screen now?
.......your mousepad?
....sure I'll get someone more knowledgeable.
[me]: You type DIR and press the ENTER key and tell me what you see.
[idiot1]: I ain't see nothing
[me]: Are you sure you are at the right directory? Please type CD BACKSLASH and press the ENTER key again. What do you see?
[idiot1]: Still nothing. Do you have somone else more knowledgeable who can help?
[me]:
[idiot1]: nothing, it's blank.
[me]: Have you turn on your terminal?
[idiot1]:....I don't think so.
Months later the same user is having brand new OS/2 to replace her dumb term DOS 3.1.
[me]: Please move your mouse pointer to the 3270 icon and double.....
[idiot1]: WAIT!!!! NOT THAT FAST! I DIDN'T SEE ANY 3270 ICON ON IT!!!!
[me]: Calm down please. All desktop is preloaded with this apps.....now what does the mouse pointer pointing at?
[idiot1]: Let me see...the I of the IBM logo.
[me]: You've a wallpaper on your desktop?
[idiot1]: Not wallpaper, but a mouse pad with IBM logo on my desktop.
[me]:
[idiot1]: ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN HELP?! I NEED TO GET JOB DONE CAN'T YOU FIX THAT QUICKIER?!
[me]:
[idiot1]: APPRECIATED!
...than "move oldlocation newlocation" how?
The point wasn't that the guy couldn't explain how to do it, it was that it had to be learned, just like the old interface. On the whole, it's not more intuitive it's just cuter.
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
Checked my copy of the dos 3.0 manual and i cannot find it - i suspect the quote is apocryphal for that and other reasons mainly related to the fact that by the time DOS 3.0 came out Apple was above 640k anyway - and this would not be consistent with the then Microsft business plan of sellling as much software as possible to build a business
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
There actually is a guy named David Gelernter who came up with something like this. Because of his computer science background, was a unabomber victim. While he was recovering, he came up with a system called "LifeStreams" that would record data throughout a person's life as if their entire life was some sort of filestream that is constantly added to.
t re ams_pr.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflifes
While the icon metaphor is limited, part of the problems people are having with it are not so much related to the design itself, but the fact that so many programmers do so many cognitively unsound things that shouldn't be done in any interface design on any platform. And this is what is really causing many users to suffer through today's desktop interfaces. For example, some programmer might implement a button layout where it is not clear how one widget relates to another. One button on one side of the screen may have some relationship to a list that is in some obscure location somewhere else on the screen (as opposed placing the button right next to the list it acts on). Or one program might have both the menu selections "Customize" and "Options", which is ridiculously confusing for the user because both words refer to the same exact type of thing (configuring something in a program) but perform different actions. I'm not pulling that particular example out of my butt--I'm taking it directly from Microsoft. Before we eliminate the icons, we need to eliminate many programmers' lack of understanding about how to create usable interfaces. If we don't do this and simply go from icons to something else, they'll just end up making the next great interface as equally miserable as the current one.
I think it's a tragedy that this article doesn't mention many of the PARC folks like Bill Verplank who were integral to the creation of the GUI. There are some interesting tidbits from the past in this article, but it's terribly underinformed to call itself a 'history'.
Thanks for the clarifications. I'll add the "Smalltalk" spelling to the addendum, along with the DEC/Digital distinction. I didn't mention Starfire because, as you said, it isn't a full-blown GUI. If you dig around the Sun site you should find some info on Starfire.
You'll find some links to archaic software here.
"Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
Human beings are very good at telling when a object is infrount of or behind another object.
Plus thanks to the growth of FPS's almost all new computers today are able to run a 3d api of some sort, either directx3d or openGL. So there is no problem on the hardware frount.
Im not proud i just what using my puter to seem like Im playing quake all the time.
just a thought.
what's that?
are you the re-incarnation of alan turing?
i couldn't hear what you said with bill gates dick in your mouth.
We refused this article - and several rewrites of it - over a year ago. The author had not researched anything at that point, claiming Steve Jobs had invented the GUI and other such nonsense based only on hearsay or whatever you want to call it. After trying to get him to look in the general direction of proper research, we gave up. All we got back were our own quotes. From the looks of it, with the Ugh and Glugh and whatever else is still in there, the author evidently hasn't made much progress - at least not on his own. This is not what journalism is supposed to be about.
radsoft.net
What I would consider to be the first GUI was Sutherland's "Sketchpad" system from the early 60's. The military had similar sorts of things predating Sutherland, but nothing quite flexible enough to really be called a full blown GUI.
:-) Sketchpad, a man-machine graphical communication system . Evidently, all the graphics in the thesis were generated by the program it described (Sketchpad). According to Alan Kay this is rare for graphics theses.
:)
Sketchpad was essentially a constraint-based drawing program using a lightpen, and using object-oriented principles for its implementation. However, to call it a GUI is not quite correct. There were e.g. no UI elements represented on the screen (such as buttons, menus, or windows). A graphics app is not the same as a GUI, i.e. a UI that uses graphics.
The thesis can be found online here: (scanned, no pdf in '63
Anybody with their brains in the right place can tell you that the GUI was not invented by Xerox PARC. They may have done a great deal to push the idea, or perhaps simply been at the right place at the right time, but the basic idea of using graphics as a means to interact with a machine predates PARC by about 20 years.
The group that created Smalltalk (Learning Research Group, LRG) was set up in or about 1971, possibly the year before. 20 years before that would be the early fifties. Sketchpad was from 1963. Engelbart's system is usually dated to '65. But neither of these were GUIs by any reasonable standard. By 1973, LRG had the first Altos and created their first GUIs. I don't know how to get "twenty years earlier" from that.
All this can be read in the classic paper The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan Kay. (A chapter in History of Programming Languages II, 1996. A preprint that may be easier to find in the library is in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, March 1993.) This is probably the most readable and enjoyable scientific paper I've ever come across. And it contains so much good stuff. It is a shame it isn't available online.
Currently, Kay is in the process of donating videos of many of the pioneering systems (NLS, Sketchpad, GRAIL, Smalltalk-72, etc.) to the Computer History Museum (I think), and converting them to digital movies (mpeg, mov?). I hope they will be placed on line.
If you really wanna have some fun, check out Doug Englebart's 1968 presentation that introduced the world to the mouse, chordboard and other interesting stuff.
It should be here (all in streaming video), but I coudn't reach the site now: Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo.
It almost brings tears to my eyes when I watch it.
Second that. But is it the demo or the non-progress since then that makes me cry?
I didn't see anything about the article(yes, I did read the entire thing.) I don't see the humor here. Anybody else feel the same way? Anyways, I can sum up the article in one sentence: The GUI revoluzionized the industry by making it easier for nearly every individual to be able to use a computer and is the most economically prosperous portion of the entire business.
Big deal.
Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
...which is ironic, since the first Macintoshes were completely monochrome...
I think if anyobdy really wants to get a history of the GUI they shoudl first turn to the book
Dealers of Lightning : Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age -- by Michael Hiltzik; Paperback
I read it recently and it just makesyou stand in awe and wonder at what these guys actually did, and what We, as users, acutally have staring us right in the face
Sigs are dangerous coy things
"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
"The SoftCard allowed the Apple II to run most of the CP-M programs that had originally been written for the IBM family of PCs."
CP/M was an 8 bit OS. The 16 bit IBM never ran CP/M, it might have ran CP/M86 at the start, certainly other early 16 bit machines like the ACT SIRIUS 1 came with both CP/M86 and MSDOS
http://www.thekeep.org/~rmitz/blazemonger.html
Microsoft began just as small and insignificantly as did Apple. Starting out as a two-man operation out of the backseat of Bill Gates's car...'
I knew it!
I'm not here. This isn't happening.
Author here. I wasn't going to mention Radsoft's involvement, but since you guys chose to poke your noses in (Rick? John?), I feel it incumbent to reply.
First off, you boys went psycho on me during the writing of this article. We started off on a very friendly basis. As I remember it, Rick, (and I kept the e-mails) you LOVED the little "caveman" set piece. Thought it was hysterical. You liked the idea of a lighter, wryly presented piece on computing history. I sent you the early, early rough drafts, and initially you responded with some very helpful suggestions, many of which I followed up on in the final version. We were even kicking around the idea of making this article the first of an entire series. Your characterization of "refusing this article" is misleading. I didn't come sniffing around Radsoft with hat in hand, looking for a home for my work. The whole idea was generated between you, Rick, and myself. You should also note that you first initiated contact with me, from my positive mention of your Extreme Power Tools utility suite in my site. If anyone came sniffing around, it was you, not me.
We continued in this vein for a while, then you guys pulled a 180 on me and sent a truly ugly message -- the whole piece was worthless, the research was lame, etc. I was surprised, to say the least. A few more unpleasantries were exchanged, and that was that. A while later, I noted that you guys even yanked all links and mentions of my Windows site from your pages -- it went from "...perhaps the most comprehensive Windows survival guide out there. This site has everything, literally everything" to being unworthy of mention. Vengeful and petty, I thought. It's also worth noting that until you saw the SitePoint article, you never saw anything remotely approaching a finished product. I sent you rough drafts specifically for the purpose of getting your feedback and letting you see the progress of the piece as it developed. Someone reading your post could easily draw the conclusion that I submitted the article to you, was refused, and continued to try to gain your approval with rewritten versions. That is exactly wrong.
I never claimed that Steve Jobs invented the GUI in any of the drafts (I have the old ones), and if you'll actually read the article, you'll see that that ridiculous claim is never made. As for "getting back your own quotes," the only thing I can think of that may fit that particular bill is a couple of minor bits about Win NT that you specifically tagged as worthy of mention. For the rest of it, I readily admitted that there were some errors that needed fixing, and those errors were corrected. I'm in the process of revising the article to incorporate the corrections and fixes, thus eliminating the "errata" section. Many of the links and info you sent me were useful, and I used them in the original version. Many others were either out of date, not germane, or gone from the Web. And most notably, every single erroneous "fact" I featured was sourced somewhere, often from sources that one would think are unimpeachable. I've learned that you can't trust any one source, no matter how authoritative it may seem. I've been in contact with numerous direct sources over the piece, and as one, Jef Raskin, told me, "You have now put the history more accurately than most sources on the subject." I think I take his judgement a bit more seriously than I take yours.
I've noted that Radsoft has metamorphosed into a site that takes great joy in savaging other people's work for the sheer pleasure of doing so. I don't say that's wrong, or not of use, but you guys seem to enjoy ripping people open for the sheer pleasure of the act. (I recall one series of exchanges where I gave you some solid advice on keeping your asses out of an international lawsuit over your libelous characterizations of some guy's shareware offerings. Had you not taken my advice and backed off, the guy could well have sued you for every dime you had.) I'm not surprised to see that you couldn't resist disparaging me on these forums. It fits your profile. I could care less about your opinion of me, Rick, but if you're going to disparage me in any public forums, then do it honestly. Don't mischaracterize the events, and don't rewrite history to make yourselves look good at my expense.
I have refrained from making any contact with Radsoft since you boys blew a fuse. Please do me the same favor and cease all contact, direct and indirect, with me. Until now, I have not discussed my former involvement with Radsoft with anyone. I would not have done so now had I not noted your posting in these forums.
I wish no further involvement with you and your petty attacks on anyone that comes within your circle. Keep on "bloatbusting" and ranting about anything and everything that draws your ire; that's your prerogative. But leave me out of it.