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."
TOS was so kick ass... 15 years ago...
Or an interesting scroll down memory lane more like it!
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Don't forget about Old OS. Also an interesting site!
Includes the tragedy that is Microsoft BOB!
KARMA TAG! You're it.
I guess I'll be using the command line today.
Finally, a /. article which doesn't immediately remind me of pyramid schemes, political graft, the extortion of the American people by their corporate executive overlords... (though all of these things combined contributed to the death of Commodore and the rise of the x86 architecture).
/.'ed.
Crap. And the site is
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
text interface counts as graphic interface?
as opposed to what... tactile interface?
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 internet backbone in European country Poland broke down today following a phenomenon known as "The slashdot effect". No people were harmed in the incident, but a lot of Slavic IT professionals were terribly inconvenienced.
Here's the Google cache.
Shouldn't this be about the history of every UI, not GUI? CLI doesn't normally incorporate graphics. ;-)
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
Too bad the sight was /.'ed so fast. I really wanted to read it. But my browser is sitting there forver....like GI Joe loading up on my old C64.
Since this site is slashdotted, there is another GUide that I know about, which is also interesting.
Nathan's GUI gallery. It has every version of windows, many macs, Unixes, plain wierd ones and of course the infamous Microsoft Bob. The IE is evil section is hilarious as well!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
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?
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 prefer a Gooey
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
On my old C128 (I was sure it was going to be the greatest thing when I sold my C64) I had GEOS and thought the graphical waste basket was neat ... until I dropped an essay in it and then panicked. That lead me to the discovery the the SECOND time you write and essay you get much better results.
But GEOS was still my first encounter with a graphical operating environment.
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.
udeproject.sourceforge.net
The binary is 90kb. It supports multiple workspaces, raising/lowering/resizing/hiding windows, background pics, color schemes, and very simple window decorations which "stay out of the way".
My favorite...
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
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.
CHUI stands for CHaracter User Interface. Pronounced "chew-ee". I like the term for text-based interfaces, as a counterpart to the GUI. A CLI is a command-line interface, which is really somewhat different from a CHUI. Remember all those DOS apps with text-based windows and menus? Curses and Vermont Views are good examples of CHUI libraries.
I use punchcards you insensitive clod!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
A text system cannot by definition display graphics.
Redefinable font lets you display graphics in text mode. The Defrag utility in MS-DOS 6.22 used this.
The PC's codepages have a glyph consisting of the top half on and the bottom half off. Set each character cell's "on color" to one color and the "off color" to another and you can display graphics in text mode. Lots of ANSI BBS screens used this, and some business software packages used this for bar graphs and the like.
And now the most from-left-field solution: Reprogramming the text generator to show four scanlines per row of glyphs rather than 16 (assuming VGA) lets you use the glyph with the left half on and the right half off for a 160x100 pixel 16 color video mode. Tunneler, an old DOS game, used this.
Holy smokes! Even the Google cache has been slashdotted!
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?
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
I also recommend Neal Stephenson's excellent essay on the topic of GUIs, In the Beginning was the Command Line
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
/not trying to start a flamewar, just fascinating quotes...
I don't see etcb-a-sketch in there.
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.
I loved Geos! Never had any problems like Win3.0 and 3.1 had.
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.
/. yet. Yet.
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
Intelligent Life on Earth
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.
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. "
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...
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.