A History of Every GUI Ever

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Posted by Hemos on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @04:02AM from the walking-through-history dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I stumbled upon this site - GUIdebook, that offers a history of every GUI, from command prompts, to GEOS for the commodore 64, through Mac OSX. It's an interesting stroll down memory lane."

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Correction? by mishehu · 2004-03-23 04:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

Shouldn't this be about the history of every UI, not GUI? CLI doesn't normally incorporate graphics. ;-)
Hey -Editors! by Erasmus · 2004-03-23 04:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

Shouldn't Slashdot's editors make at least a token effort to see if the pages they link to can stand the traffic they invariably direct to them?
Is a quick email to a webmaster really such an astoundingly difficult task or is effectively DoSing every interesting small webpage on the Internet the goal?
1. Re:Hey -Editors! by PhuckH34D · 2004-03-23 04:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  they dont do that.
  Read the FAQ
  ( and while your at it, this is the "coolest story Slashdot's ever had")
  
  --
  You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
2. Re:Hey -Editors! by .com+b4+.storm · 2004-03-23 04:36 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Shouldn't Slashdot's editors make at least a token effort ...
  
  This doesn't occur for much the same reason people are often jerks in traffic and don't give someone room to enter their lane. Despite the fact it would take a measly 5 seconds out of their precious day, they'd rather hog the lane and not let you in. The reason being, of course, that since nobody makes them exercise that courtesy, they generally will not. And so it is with Slashdot...
  
  --
  "Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
  -- Ryan Stiles
3. Re:Hey -Editors! by prisoner-of-enigma · 2004-03-23 05:23 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  This doesn't occur for much the same reason people are often jerks in traffic and don't give someone room to enter their lane.
  
  Perhaps if people would try manipulating that funny stalk poking out of the steering column called a "blinker," then I'd consider letting them over. If they're too lazy to put on a blinker, they can try to get in front of someone else. I certainly don't want them in front of me.
  
  --
  In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Re:...like a C64 game loading /snore by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-23 04:10 · Score: 1, Insightful

It's 2004, I didn't think people STILL say 'sight' when referring to a SITE.
Re:Nice... by hattig · 2004-03-23 04:30 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think that the Atari ST had nice styling for the time (it looked nicer than the A500 for example). Shame about the innards though. And these are what counted in the end.
Re:Kind of telling by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-23 05:49 · Score: 1, Insightful

Your analogy--as most analogies that people make to try and prove a point--doesn't hold water.
The command line is more powerful than any GUI. It's also harder unless some kind of wrapper (menu system, Lynx shell, etc.) was setup as a front-end for non-programmers. Because, guess what, the shell is a programming language. And believe it or not, programming languages can do a lot more than a mouse pointer and a bunch of icons.
Which isn't to say you can't program in a GUI environment, but you'll never get away from typing text. That's what it's all about, in the end.
Re:Seriously... by LinuxHam · 2004-03-23 06:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Linux and the Free software community has grown to achieve business acceptance. /. is like MTV, except the people who actually brought Linux to the corporate world don't realize that they're too old to keep coming back.

MTV doesn't have a single show aimed at 30 somethings (let alone 40ish and 50ish) so I can delete the channel from my favorites list. I can't quite do that with our beloved /. yet. Yet.

--
Intelligent Life on Earth
"A History of Every GUI Ever"? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-23 06:31 · Score: 1, Insightful

*EVERY* GUI ever? I seriously doubt it...

A complete list of every GUI ever made would have to include every cell phone, PDA, GPS, and all the other random electronic devices that have ever had a GUI. And that's not even including the more esoteric devices. I'll give you an example. I used to work at a shop that had a big ass 3000W Mitsubishi LASER that we would used to cut out precision parts, and yes, it had a GUI.

I think "Every GUI ever" is stretching it just a bit...
devil's advocate by Crag · 2004-03-23 07:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

One could have said something similiar about automative and horse-drawn carriage interfaces around 90 years ago. It's not a flawless analogy, but your point is far from unassailable.

* terminal consoles HAVE changed a great deal in 30 years (tab completion, screen, mouse daemons, curses, whiptail, multi-byte support, ...)

* Most GUI differences are superficial tweaks made to thwart lawsuits, or to convince potential customers that there's a difference between OS versions that's worth upgrading for.

* The people who are intimidated by either interface tend to just be intimidated by computers. The rest will use whatever is best for the job.

I prefer text interfaces because it suits the way I think, but my extremely intelligent girlfriend understands both and prefers GUIs because they match how she thinks.

It's about time we grow out of this kind of debate...