Slashdot Mirror
A History of Every GUI Ever
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."
that website is definately a memory NOW! Funny though I started with fvwm wayback, went through windows UI, CDE, kde, gnome and I'm back with fvwm2 as my main GUI.
The work by Engelbart (from PARC) directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. Several people went from SRI to Xerox PARC in the early 1970's (where I worked).
The Xerox PARC team codified the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointers) paradigm, first pioneered on the Xerox Alto experimental computer, but which eventually appeared commercially in the Xerox 8010 ('Star') system in 1981
Don't you think it's kind of telling that GUIs have required so many iterations and versions and still people havent managed to learn how to use a computer properly, they're still difficult to use and still people end up not being able to get them to do what they want.
Yet the terminal console is almost unchanged in 30 years. Hmmmm?
I remember GEOS - it was actually a nice little Mac-style OS for C64. It's funny to see a complete package, with "paint", "wordpad" and so on run in less than 64k of memory.
HOTU has a PC version of it.
Oh it's already gone.
Slashdot could do everyone us a favour by putting a mirror of the article/site on its own server temportarily just in case the inevitable happens.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Now there is a blast from the past. I have fond memories of using GeoWorks Ensemble while in graduate school. I was forced to pickup a used RadioShack B&W 286 laptop in order to attend a computer class. The class was full but they allowed a few additional students to sign in if they had laptops. So I had a copy of GeoWorks and I cranked out a ton of term papers with it. It was a pretty nifty program for it's time. It ran very quickly on that 286.
Nah, TOS sucked. (I was on the team that shipped it. TOS *definitely* sucked, even 15 years ago).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Here's the Google cache.
Since google cache doesnt show gfx, and you want to see some pictures, go check out xwinman, a nice list of different types of xwindow managers and a history of each. Not everything has to be a GUI for a microsoft OS. http://www.plig.org/xwinman/
You can definately make graphic interfaces in text mode. If you ask a completely non-computer person if that's a GUI, he'll probably think so. As opposed to what? A verbal interface a la Star Trek?
The CLI is simply the most minimalist GUI you can have on your screen. The whole GUI concept as used in computing was like "as opposed to text-based", but it doesn't really change the fact that "text" is nothing but a simple form of graphics.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Q: so exactly which of those historical OSs hosting this just got quick-fried?
Obs: I saw Doug Englebart a few years ago giving a large group presentation - he had the best interface I'd ever seen for a presentation - the current slide was displayed in a frame of thumbnails of the slides in the entire presentation - so you had random access to the whole show, you could see the flow, he could jump and reference other slides if needed without the typical bambi-on-ice powerpoint shuffle.
Oh yeah, the presentation was great, too - the analogy of introducing GUIs to telling horse riders how it was going to be driving cars, ("I have to lookk in a mirror to go the other way? I can't even shave in a mirror without hurting myself...") was original, funny and insightful.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I really miss the days when screens were created from proportionally spaced fonts. When you would draw boxes on the screen with special table drawing fonts or by changing the background and foreground colours ("teletex style"). You very rarely see that these days, which is a real shame because not only is it very efficient and simple from a programming point of view, but a well designed screen in that style can be very pleasing on the eye.
It's a shame that the only proportionally spaced web font accessible to designers is courier, which sucks. Lucida Console is nicer but not available on all systems.
Anyone know of any web sites designed with proportionally spaced fonts?
First I've heard of "CHUI", and I've got the Babirusa/Celebes pig deer book and used Vermont Views. TurboVision from Borland had to be the ultimate of that lost art.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why isnt this being done?
.torrent file.
A simple wget -m http://www.somesite.com, gzip, create a torrent, and share the
user@host$ diff
/not trying to start a flamewar, just fascinating quotes...
The early 8-bit home computers could do bitmap graphics, and in fact it was a big selling point.... "Game XYZ, fight monsters in actual bitmap graphics!' Check out Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple 2 emulators for an idea of what 'good graphics' once meant. I don't remember the resolution of those early screens anymore, but it was very low... certainly not higher than 320x200.
When the Mac shipped, computers really changed. Instead of a text OS with occasional, fully-focused graphical programs, the machine was so incredibly powerful (8mhz, 16 bit) that it could do graphics all the time...they could actually draw a user interface on a 512x384 screen and have time left over. That's 196,608 pixels. I don't know how many bits per pixel the first Mac used... I keep wanting to say "one", but I think I remember grays on those first Macs, so that might be wrong. If it WAS one bit per pixel, they could represent that screen in about 24k. That's still a lot of data to push around, compared with the 2k for a text screen, and could be as high as 196K if it was 8 bits/pixel. I'm pretty sure it wasn't that high... the first Mac had only 128k of RAM. Maybe it was just black/white.
They actually managed to get a fairly good GUI up on the 1Mhz C64 with GEOS, but it was the Mac that first showed the mainstream that it was even possible.
Everything after that has been about accelerating that basic idea. For a long time, neither the Mac nor the PC was really fast enough to animate the whole screen at once at a reasonable framerate. Games had to be very clever to work around this; even though they'd done a GUI on the 64, it was still very, very hard to animate a full screen on a PC. As I recall, that was mostly due to bus speed; the system simply couldn't shovel enough bits out to the graphics card over an ISA bus. The processor was more than capable, but the bus just wasn't up to it.
For the last 15 years, the whole evolution of computers has been about making graphics go faster. First there were Windows (2D) accelerators, then full motion video, which flopped as a concept, because it didn't make good games and didn't work very well. A number of years ago, we finally got to the point that pretty much every computer in the world can do very smooth full motion video, and nobody even noticed, the idea was that dead. Then 3D accelerators, then GPUs, then hardware T&L.... the driving force in PC development has been graphics.
Sometime in the last couple of years, PCs really hit a plateau; they've gotten fast enough to do practically anything we can think of, at least for now. We can generate, manipulate, and output graphics of unbelievable quality... and we're mostly pretty blase' about the whole thing.
I'll tell you, though, if I showed my desktop machine (Athlon 2800+, GeForce FX5950, dual 36gb Raptors in RAID-0, Audigy 2 Platinum, Klipsch 5.1 speakers) to my 15-year-old self, I'd fear for my life. In 1985, I'd have killed someone with a big smile on my face to own a machine like that.
Phew, I kinda went off on a tangent there. Getting back on track..... GUI means a very specific thing. If the OS can turn individual dots on and off, and draws the user interface that way, it's a GUI.
Tell that to VIC20 programmers. Unlike the C64, the VIC20 didn't have a graphics mode. But you could display a 16x16 grid showing the whole character set, and then tell the video hardware to look up the character definitions somewhere in RAM instead of using the ROM. This effectively gave you a 128 pixel by 128 pixel bitmap display, on a "text-only" system.
Oh, and speaking of the fact that text mode is faster than graphics, there was a "joke" later in the mid 80s, having to do with that. If you wrote a BASIC program on the C64 that, say, computed and printed the first 100 prime numbers, and then did the same thing on the Amiga, the C64 was faster. People would say, "Huh? How can that be? The Amiga's blazing 7 MHz 16-bit 68000 runs rings around the 6510!" But then you'd do it, and the C64 would really win. It had nothing to do with the how fast the processors could compute primes, though. It was just that the C64 could copy 2k of RAM (the amount of work to "scroll" the text display) faster than the Amiga blitter could copy several hundred k to "scroll" a graphic display. (The Amiga didn't have a text mode. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A story about old GUIs is hardly "breaking news." It's not like "Oh shit, the missiles are on the way and everyone has 10 minutes to read this story about how the nuclear holocaust started." (Heh, I can imagine Slashdot addicts trying to load the page instead of ducking and covering. (Then someone posts, "Is this really news for nerds?"))
Not everyone needs to see this type of article at once. For non-news articles on small sites, they could gradually reveal the article to viewers, over the period of a day or two. (e.g. If your IP address plus the article ID, mod 48, happens to be greater than the number of hours since the article was released, then it doesn't get included on your copy of front page.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Also Atari's GEM as was noted previously.
The site apparently completely misses pen computing oriented UIs though.
No PenPoint, PenRight, Newton, Palm, WinCE
Rather a shame that, especially given that some pen programs have been _very_ innovative / influential.
FutureWave SmartSketch gave us Flash
Newton provides Mac OS X w/ InkWell
Go getting buried gave MS room for Windows for Pen Computing, and Taiwan a stick to beat them up w/ for licensing (Taiwan's MITI bought PenPoint)
Also misses HP's NewWave, which was note merely a shell on top of Windows, but also a UI in its own right (was to be the UI for Newtek's Mac clones)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What about my favorite GUI of all time? Okay, my favorite was the DR-DOS SHELL ViewMAX, but still! All DOSSHELLs demand respect!
Off the top of my head:
Sun: Sunview, and NeWS
AT&T: BLIT, DMD5620. DMD620, DMD630, DMD730, UnixPC/3B1
DEC: DECwindows/Motif
And I am sure there are many more that I have forgotten.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
To be linguistically correct, modern computers would be said to employ PUIs (Pictoral User Interfaces)
How is that linguistically correct? Linguistically speaking, words are, for the most part, completely arbitrary--onomatopoeia being the one near-exception. When we speak of what words mean, we speak of what they are generally accepted to mean. Language is by no means a stagnant entity; it evolves and changes over time. Thus, it is perfectly linguistically correct to refer to the user interfaces as graphical user interfaces.
This GUI was thie coolest thing going and was just amazing in its flexibility. It was based on windowed interpreted PostScript. What your widow did depended on what Postscript told it to do, each window was the execution of mobile code, the Java of 1989. You could have windows based on arbitrary, and I mean completely arbitrary, polygons.
My favorite feature was round menus. You could navigate these incredibly quickly.
Sadly X took off at about the same time and no one cared whether X was INFERIOR and SLOW as long as it was free and open source. Oh wait, NeWS was open source back then too. Well mostly.
What a lot of people also don't know is that NeWS really was a practice run for Java. It heavily influenced the java architecture team.
- Andrew
The BBC Micro of the 80's (made by Acorn) had a "Mode 7" teletext mode which would give you not only a chunky colour TRS-80-style block graphics, but only used 1K (40 column by 25 lines) of memory mapped characters (at hex 7C00 if my "memory" serves me right). This meant you could refresh the entire screen of text in 6502 assembly code in a few milliseconds (it had a 2Mhz 6502 processor) and the scrolling speed was also phenomenal (I called it "the fruit machine effect"!) - probably still faster than any other machine out there I've seen to date.