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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.
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.
The answer is you are using Netscape 4.7 under *nix and have not done anything to fix your fonts. Upgrade to Mozilla tweak your fonts and it should look much better.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
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.
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
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
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.
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.