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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.
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
.... 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.
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
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.
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. ;-)
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