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."
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.
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
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
Google doesn't store images. Right back at square one.
The Wayback Machine doesn't have it, and it's probably too late for anyone to mirror it.
May we never see th
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.
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?
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...
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.
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