A Non-Dogmatic History of the GUI

Zoxed writes "Jeremy Reimer provides an 8-page history of GUIs from the early 1930s to the present day. For example, from the conclusion: 'the truth of the story is that the GUI was developed by many different people over a long period of time. Saying that "Apple invented the GUI" or "Apple ripped off the idea from PARC" is overly simplistic, but saying that "Xerox invented the GUI" is equally so.'"

Comments

I'm missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm missing CDE and Looking glass in that article, nice sumary otherwhise. Well up to 1989 anyway, then it starts to lack a bit IMO.

Re:I'm missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I was quite puzzled by the lack of detail on X GUIs... Not just CDE, but the plethora of Unix WMs that have existed over the years, many of them quite innovative and influential...

NEWS FLASH!

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash!

Ars Technica has written yet another story about technology history.

More on this shocking news as it develops.

30s gui? now i know what those win32*.* files are.

[ultramarweeni]

I'd want to see 'Windows 32' up and running. I have these win32* files on my computer, I'm pretty sure they are reminiscents of that ancient 30's GUI. But on what computer hardware would that have been running on?

Love of the Mouse

[Janitha]

After reading this, I noticed one thing, seems like the idea has been stuck into the same idea this whole time, a simple 2d screen. Even vr googles use two 2d screens. Hopefully this will change more as the development of layered LCD's and other technologies start comming up. True 3d gui's are what I am waiting for now.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[drivinghighway61]

While a 3D GUI would be nifty, I can't seeing layered LCDs really bringing it to its full potential. Furthermore, the mouse has to go as an interface device for a 3D environment. It needs to be replaced with something better for simple 3D interaction. The mouse works for 3D games, but it can't go six directions for a 3D environment.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Janitha]

The mouse subject was accidental, I was initially writing about the mouse when I realized this, and your are right a mouse wouldnt really work well.

Would be pretty nice to have a a simply point and touch in a real space, or simply just have the computer track eye movements, where you can just simply stare down a item you wish to click (or look at it and click) or a combination of touch and look.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[FidelCatsro]

I think im going to avoid true 3D GUIs for the first few years , You know how knew tech always gets used in the daftest situations at first .
We will be lambasted with fully 3d Wordprocesors and on our web browsers pop ups will really pop up. I Remember how bad it was when flash first got popular and every site under the sun included it in all sorts of funny ways.Well it will be nothing compared to blogs with 3d dancing letters and Hampster dances that will run all around and try to nibble on your cords.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[elgatozorbas]

Would be pretty nice to have a a simply point and touch in a real space

Nice, but probably also very tiring and difficult, without point of reference. Besides, what would all these 3D gui's be suitable for? 3D-modeling, mechanical CAD and the likes are obviously a good candidates. But apart from those? I never felt the need for either a 3D pointing device or display. Can you give some more examples of applications where such devices would have an added value?

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Peter Cooper]

I don't see the point. It's like demanding 3D paper or 3D TV. Paper and TV have been around significantly longer than GUIs, and I don't see anyone jumping to make those 3D. I saw some demos of some 3D TVs in the 90's, and while the idea had a certain 'cool' factor.. it seemed pointless.

Some things simply don't need to be more complicated than they are.. like adding buttons and extra text boxes onto Google search, or developing 3D paper.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Junichiro Koizumi]

The mouse and the dumbarse point and click interface have to die.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[oldwolf13]

I don't really think a 3D GUI would help much in 3d modelling and CAD stuff, which I have done both... sure the viewports are in 3d, but having the windows and stuff be 3d wouldn't do much.

Then it might be nice for those of us who don't maximize everything... can have a layered desktop... using the mouse scroll wheel for depth. Of course, the mouse wheel might have to be smoother then current ones to work better.

Who knows... only time will tell, but the current 3D GUI's looking like they'd be useful only for "oh neat" factors.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Xarius]

Even vr googles use two 2d screens.

When did google launch this "vr" service?!

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, what would all these 3D gui's be suitable for? [..] I never felt the need for either a 3D pointing device or display. Can you give some more examples of applications where such devices would have an added value?

One thing that stuck in my head from my CS course in user interfaces was that (paraphrasing and condensing), "3D interfaces suck".

A major problem is that in a 2D interface, everything is visible (*); in a 3D interface, things can be 'hidden' behind other things, or even 'inside' a group of other things. At least you'll have to move around to see items; in the latter case, you'll actually have to move some items themselves aside to see other items.

Also; bear in mind that 3D interfaces will always be observed via two 2D projections (in your eyes, of course); this does *not* give anything approaching full knowledge of the 3D world from a given perspective. 2D on the other hand, does not have this problem.

On the course mentioned above, we were shown a video from the early 90s (this was circa 2001/02), with a virtual reality file management system. Navigation was via a hierarchy of logically-organized rooms in a building; files were finally found within boxes and folders.

Even then, it seemed vary dated in an "early 1990s virtual reality fetishising" way. In short, with the benefit of hindsight (*or* the ability to step back from the hype), it is obvious that the system was gimmicky and inefficient compared to the still-prevelant Mac/Windows-style folder navigation.

If technology was the limiting factor on 3D interfaces, I believe they'd have become commonplace by the second half of the 1990s. The fact that they aren't says more about the mechanics and usability of them than it does about display technology.

(*) Yeah. Things *can* be hidden by other things in most current GUIs. That's because they offer a very restricted level of 3D; namely layers of depth. They get away with this *because* it's limited.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[promantek]

A 3D UI would be too confusing and complicated.

A much more interesting question is how can we improve and speed up human input into a computer?

• Use a mouse that follows eye movement. It's already used by disabled people but it's certainly not mainstream.
• Use brain pattern recognition for input. For example, look at the X to close a window and think about closing it - then it would happen.

These suggestions are just that - suggestions, and I'm sure others could think of more clever and useful ones. Any other ideas?

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Janitha]

I originally intended to say 3D Interfaces in a true 3D interface (in 3d space, where when you look from front and back its different), not a virtual 3d interface in a 2d screen. I just like to think of the uses being like my desk, I can put stuff, stack them (like you said), and go through them just like I do in real life. There is no such 3d interface currently to compare what I meant.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Dun Malg]

After reading this, I noticed one thing, seems like the idea has been stuck into the same idea this whole time, a simple 2d screen. Even vr googles use two 2d screens. Hopefully this will change more as the development of layered LCD's and other technologies start comming up. True 3d gui's are what I am waiting for now.

Why? We can't see in 3 dimensions. Our visual organs only see two dimensional pictures. Our brains use the parallax from two 2D images to give us depth perception, but this really isn't true 3D vision. What is it that you think a 3D display is going to add? How much additional information is really conveyed by depth cues? It's just not that useful a trick on its own. Now, if you were somehow able to add a 3D controller and tactile feedback, then that might be worthwhile.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[kryptkpr]

Layered LCDs (aka SOLED) really have 2 advantages. One is that they (that is, TOLEDs) can be made (around 70% opacity) transparent by using a transparent conductor (called ITO .. read Universal Display's patents one day if you can manage to get through it) for the electrodes, and two is that they can produce the full RGB spectrum (by stacking transparent layers) in 1/3rd of the physical space.

So while this is cool and all, it's not really going to help with a 3D gui, as these OLEDs are still made in 2D sheets.. they just use a transparent conductor. What they WILL allow for is stuff like super high resolution Heads-Up-Displays on car windshields.. which is still damn cool by me.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[mikael]

Personally, I'd like to have a mouse with a mini-trackball rather than a jog-wheel. Move the mouse around for large distances, move the trackball around for small distances.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[iamlucky13]

The Sphere desktop environment probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but I think it's neat. It's really more of a toy than a tool.

It's basically a program that replaces the standard desktop in XP with a spherical one. Your vision is at the center of the sphere, and you can look 360 deg, including up and down and place windows throughout the entire environment. You can also get some rather dizzying backgrounds for it.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[mikael]

The Sharp 3D Actius laptop can do true stereo display without the use of special glasses, although images to have to be preprocessed. If this could be extended to LCD's in general and windowing system updated accordingly, then true 3D GUI's could be possible.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Kent Recal]

Sounds interesting. Just what would be a practical application for "small distance"?

Re:Love of the Mouse

[mikael]

Sounds interesting. Just what would be a practical application for "small distance"?

3D modelling - move mouse to translate model, move trackball to rotate object, and free up the mouse buttons for something else.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[GoCal92]

Can you give some more examples of applications where such devices would have an added value?

Geographic Systems - make those topos come alive
Simulations/Training
Gaming
And, of course the main driver - pornography

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Janitha]

goggles.. haha, I wont be suprised if google does launch a virtual reality system.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[hazah]

What comes to mind is that, as crude as it is to imagine these days, is that the screen is nothing more than a grid of dots with values associated with them. Hence, it is very likely that attempts at a truly 3D interface are simply futile.

Now, I play quake regualrly, so I can't say I'm no fan of 3D. But the thing is, it's not so much the 3D, as it is the limits set out by the way the environment is presented to you. The actual 3D navigation is extremely simple. It is designed to mimic basic x/y/z type movements from a reference point.

So, the problem is, as I see it, is the abstraction. What is it, in the context of OS function, that we are trying to abstract? Surely you could navigate a network the same way that you would look for a street, but you can also look at a map before hand. The map itself is an abstraction. It is a model of real information with meta information (grid [rows-cols], etc...). Using a map, you essentially open yourself up for an entierly different set of decisions, separating yourself from the original set of problems you would probably have to solve had you not looked at the map (OOP ring a bell?).

The OS is much more useful as a map than it is as an actual "environment", imho. The 2D gui's currently can provide the necessary 3D information, if need be. I would say their only shortcomings are dealing with clutter. Even so, because of the way a computer functions underneath all the eye-candy, a good CLI is generally much more usefull and flexible. It's strength is the simple fact that it tailors more to the way we speak. That is, it allows us to use a language of words.

Concidering that any programming language is an attempt to use words to communicate instructions (that is, the 0-1 sequences {sic}) to the computers, I'd say it's a safe bet that for actual OS operations a (good!) CLI will have no alternative.

Now I have my preferences, and I guess, the baiases that come with them, but I wouldn't really see a point to a 3D OS environment unless we're on a holodeck or something.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[TeknoHog]

We can't see in 3 dimensions. Our visual organs only see two dimensional pictures. Our brains use the parallax from two 2D images to give us depth perception, but this really isn't true 3D vision.

True. You could say this is because a lightray has one dimension, so in N dimension you can only have N-1 dimensional vision.

On the other hand, you can turn your head and see the 3D world from many different points of view, thus creating a mental 3D image. I think this is where a "true 3D" display might help.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[kintin]

> 3D interfaces suck

What the hell do you mean 3D interfaces suck? Like MMORPG's? Like FPS's (I'm pretty sure DOOM: The Board Game sux04z)? Like the entire world? Name an earthly "interface" (and things like your car, the television, the stove, etc.) that would be improved by a 2D interface.

> If technology was the limiting factor on 3D interfaces, I believe they'd have become commonplace by the 2nd half of the 1990s.... Also; bear in mind that 3D interfaces will always be observed via two 2D projections (in your eyes, of course); this does *not* give anything approaching full knowledge of the 3D world from a given perspective. 2D on the other hand, does not have this problem.

I'm confused. Are we talking about the monitor that always displays a 3D interface in 2D, or the eyes? Either way I'm not sure that's right, monitors simulate depth quite well, much like IMAX movie screens, and if not, there's always 3D monitors and goggles. Even so, isn't that a technical limitation? If we're talking about eyes, then is there no such thing as a 3D interface anywhere? I mean, I guess I'm __pretty__ sure my girlfriend's in 3D, but I may need to check again. *grins*

Regardless, the real gain of 3D interfaces is that depth/location provides context, which at first might not prove to be such a valuable thing. Sure, 2D interfaces provide context all over the place, my favorites are greyed out options, confusing dialog screens, inconsistently placed buttons that work sometimes, and keyboard shortcuts that don't give any feedback... or do different things depending upon the programmer's definition of 'context'. In 3D interfaces (let's take a stove for example) you would never ever ever have someone call you complaining that they couldn't set the stove temperature from inside the stove. I feel retarded even saying it. However, in a 2D interface there's all kinds of questions, "why can't we do this from here?" because they don't understand the magical Computer World the programmer's created with its own random rules.

Of course 3D interfaces suck when you emulate all the bad points of 2D interfaces (like walking down a hallway to get to a new fileroom/filedrawer/folder/file? Jesus, who the fuck thought that was efficient in the slightest? I get upset looking for a file under more than 2 folders.), but that seems a little moronic to me. The problem with a 3D file management interface isn't 3D interfaces, it's the way we conceive of and use files. Rather than think of them as mere bit-buckets, think of them as tiny programs with lots of different methods.

For instance, in a 3D interface, I'd expect to pick up a piece of paper (an OpenOffice document), write on it (edit the document), draw a picture (import a graphic), make a paper airplane of it and toss it through a portal labeled BOSS (e-mail it to my boss). Though that's probably way too much fun for any normal office environment, and probably requires too much screen real-estate, but then we've run into social/technological limitations, not interface ones.

To summarize, any interface sucks if you write a sucky one, but designing a quality interface requires a thorough understanding of what you're interfacing with, who will be using your interface, and for what. Getting caught up in current methodology is a surefire way to create 8 consecutive Operating Systems that all have the same braindead usability.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Skrybe]

There was a little snippet I saw at Gizmag about radical new approaches to display devices and interfaces. Some of the more interesting ideas included involving other senses so you got tactile feedback not just sight/sound. Another one of the interesting ideas was projecting images onto a 3d globe so you could view and manipulate data on the globe.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[Skrybe]

I dunno. I think it'd be awesome to have *true* 3d (holographic) TV. Pausing it and looking at something from any angle would be very cool. Not to mention the feeling of immersion that you get from 3d (even crappy pseudo 3d like Jaws 3d).

I think the reason we still have 2d TV is not because 3d TV isn't a good idea. It's more because they haven't come up with a simple, foolproof, reasonably inexpensive technology to do it yet.

Re:Love of the Mouse

[2short]

"What the hell do you mean 3D interfaces suck?"

I think he means, it is hard to imagine how a third dimension would improve the usability or clarity of interfaces for most tasks. You mention 3D games, but the point of a game is not to give you the clearest, most efficient interface possible. You want the monsters in Doom to be hidden behind the corner; you want slight difficulties in predicting how a complex system will react to your actions to cause you to fail. If Doom were an office productivity app, I'd want to pull down the monsters menu, pick select-all, and hit the "Kill" button. Done; but not much fun.

"Name an earthly "interface" (and things like your car, the television, the stove, etc.) that would be improved by a 2D interface."

Thre tech obviously isn't there, but my car could be improved by clcicking on a 2-D map, and having it drive me there. It's a lot easier to find your way somewhere from an overhead 2-d view than a ground-level 3-d one. Not sure what you mean about the TV; mine is 2D currently. My stoves functions are controled by a 2D panel; My stove is 3D only in ways required for it to function (it must be a box you can put things in, with a door you can open), but the control interface is entirely 2D.

" in a 3D interface, I'd expect to pick up a piece of paper (an OpenOffice document), write on it (edit the document), draw a picture (import a graphic), make a paper airplane of it and toss it through a portal labeled BOSS (e-mail it to my boss). "

I agree that's too much fun for most offices. But it also sounds like you're looking for a more real-world-metaphor based interface, not a 3D one; at the least, the writing on a peice of paper sounds pretty 2-d to me. And I really don't see the advantage of the process you describe over how I create and email a document currently. Fold a paper airplane every time I want to send an email? And do I have a "portal" for every person I might want to email? You must throw planes more accurately thean me.

Depends ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on what you define as GUI. A command line based interface? No. A text mode full screen interface? Maybe. An interface running smart use of pixel graphics? Definetely.

Also it needs to be considered that many applications incorporate definitely non-GUI-elements into their GUIs. For example CAD programs often have a command line (love 'em).

Cool

[turtled]

Very interesting... and you can see GUIs stem off to those such as on Console gaming machines, Palm Pilots, Cell Phones, even Home Theater receivers and DVD players. Well done, nice read (well, I skimmed through it).

Re:Cool

[MichaelSmith]

I work for a company which sells air traffic control software. Lately I have been conducting training courses for software engineers working with our product.

I offered the opinion to my students that the radar display, implemented as computer graphics, is one of the best graphical user interface metaphors that you can find.

And there it is in this article:

During the war he had worked as a radar operator, so he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them.

Which makes me think that the CRT radar display where theta on the screen tracks the radar head revolution, and R represents the time for the echo to come back was the first true, working GUI.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the traditional oscilliscope predate the sweep radar screen. IIRC, the original radar displays were oscilliscopes showing the return as signal strength over time, with no azimuth information. The operator looked at an azimuth ring on the antenna to get the bearing.

However, neither that nor the sweep radar display were really the "user interface", as in control input. The oscilliscope and radar controls consisted of knobs external to the display on both.

When did radar operators start using light pens? I'd consider that qualifying for "GUI" status.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

What is interesting about things many if not all of us already know about?

What is interesting about someone spitting back and reciting information that is OLD news??

What is interesting about an article written by a novice in this field, and one with no professional experience as a programmer period, or degree in Computer Science, Data Processing even, period???

Above all, what's interesting about an inaccurate blurb by a nobody in this field like Reimer who attempts to recite already known information, just rehashing it????

I didn't know Slashdot put up "term papers", much less ones without footnotes in them!

I use an Xterm

[corsec67]

Heh,my primary interface to my computer is still a terminal, but inside a GUI. The only applications I use that really use the mouse are Mozilla and Gaim. For the rest, I use the keyboard primarily, for school work (Emacs, gcc, and latex) and such.

Re:I use an Xterm

[Anonymous Coward]

wow aren't you 1337!!!

Re:I use an Xterm

[xiando]

I could not agree more. Terminaled based programs are often more effective and gets things done faster. Sure, they are often a bit harder to learn, but once you've done that it's a whole lot better experience. But I don't use xterm, though, I use aterm...

Re:I use an Xterm

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could point me to a terminal based graphics program, as powerful as Photoshop, I would agree... until then, I'll stay in the sticks and be envious of you super-elite cmdline hax0rz,.

Re:I use an Xterm

[Bazzalisk]

emerge sync; emerge -u world;etc-update.

wouldn't emerge -uN world be better?

Re:I use an Xterm

[Arctic Fox]

I don't know how attached you are to Gaim, but if you're interested in a terminal n-curses based IM program, check out naim.

Re:I use an Xterm

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of like how Morse code is more effective and gets things done faster than SMS texting?

Re:I use an Xterm

[ninboy]

ok for the last time not all console apps are command line , lots are ncurses based like pine, mc , twin , etc .

Re:I use an Xterm

[Anonymous Coward]

Also center icq, it supports msn and yahoo as well as icq/aol.

Jef Raskin

[drivinghighway61]

Why, why, why, I invented Ars Technica!
Jef Raskin

Re:Jef Raskin

[Anonymous Coward]

Arstechnica = biggest bunch of asses online. This example, from Jeremy Reimer (an idiot who email harasses others and was recently caught for it, as well as other idiocy @ Windows IT Pro forums)?

He doesn't even have a degree in this field, or professional experience as a programmer.

What is this "term paper" of his doing here? We already know this stuff as coders largely.

It's nothing original - just a reciting of already proven knowledge, and he made mistakes & is inaccurate through much of it to boot!

GUI is over-rated

[xiando]

I know. I am a bit strange to think GUI is over-rated. And in very many cases, GUI does the best job. But CLI, text-based, is my preferred choice for a broad variety of applications. Text-based simply gets the job done quicker and more smoothly in many cases. Actually, unless I am working with something that actually requires graphics I prefer text-based..

Re:GUI is over-rated

[conteXXt]

here here!! (or is it Hear Hear? I can never remember).

and also, there are very few (any?) server apps that would benefit from a gui.

I don't really have an imigination but I cannot think of one off hand.

anyone?

Re:GUI is over-rated

[conteXXt]

or an "imagination" for the Grammar Nazis (go GNs, Go)

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Richard_at_work]

I agree, there are cases where the CLI works better, but there are also cases where GUIs work better too. Tell me how to select and manipulate 10 dissimiliarly named files at the same time in a directory with 100 files in, on the commandline? EG to ftp somewhere, to cp somewhere or to delete. You might spend some moments formulating a regexp to catch just the files you want and testing it, but a GUI selection ability is much faster.

My point? Theres point to both methods.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[FidelCatsro]

The only server i can think of that requires a GUI is X11(boom tish) or the likes .
Other than that a GUI interface is really just a preferance for the user.
I personaly do most of my work on the command line , the only thing i would really not enjoy doing on the command line would be Graphical work , i know its possible but its not plesant.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you've never worked with a *good* GUI. A good GUI is self explaining (=> you're quick because you don't have to read docs), and allows the user to take short cuts for functions that *he* (or she) needs to use frequently (=> if well designed, this allows work at speeds that match those of purely text based apps). Some elements for user interaction commonly found in GUIs: menusbars, context menus, toolbars/icons, keyboard shortcuts, and - believe it or not - command lines.

That being said, unfortunately many GUIs suck, probably because good GUI design takes brains and usability tests.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[NanoGator]

"I know. I am a bit strange to think GUI is over-rated. And in very many cases, GUI does the best job. But CLI, text-based, is my preferred choice for a broad variety of applications. Text-based simply gets the job done quicker and more smoothly in many cases. Actually, unless I am working with something that actually requires graphics I prefer text-based.."

In your case, that's great. However, UI isn't just about quick efficient interfaces with the computer, it's also about making an interface that a new user can do something with. A text interface is the WORST interface to give somebody who's never used the system. If a GUI is designed well, you can tell a user what their goal is and they'll work it otu. With a text UI, the user will fly over to Google.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[orangesquid]

Tab completion ;)
Globbing, wildcards, tab completion, and regexes are good tools to handle different situations where you need to quickly get the computer to pin down certain files without much effort from the user. Clicking with the mouse can be useful, but sometimes CLI will actually be faster.. depends on what you're doing.
One really nice GUI feature is copying+pasting of files. I like it. I would like more, though, the ability to gather files as I maneuver around the filesystem and then deposit them various places. It's tough to think of both source and destination in a filesystem tree for me.. it's easier to use the get/put type inventory system in RPGs, which i s similar to file copy+paste.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Moofie]

So, is it bad that the GUI was created? Does it somehow diminish you?

You like the CLI. That's fine. Do you think that everybody works like you do?

Re:GUI is over-rated

[conteXXt]

good one.

But really, Is there a server that really benefits from a gui.

Isn't a text config preferred by ALL admins?

Windows Admins? Remember being able to use a logon script to actually do stuff?

And pelease don't mention windows scripting host. That is the most non intuitive device I have ever seen.

A script is a set of commands. On their own the commands should do work.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[myowntrueself]

"Tab completion ;)
Globbing, wildcards, tab completion, and regexes"

Does emacs count as a GUI?

I use dired mode a lot, and being able to mark files for later operations is extremely useful, and far easier to work with than the commandline.
Copy, move, rename multiple files based on regex and captures...

Re:GUI is over-rated

[rbmyers]

Oh, good heavens. The significance of the GUI is not how useful it is for people who are comfortable with a CLI. The GUI is what made computers accessible to the vast unwashed masses who never have and never will write so much as "Hello, World."

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think CLI is valuable but there's a point where it is more or less a bunch of excess keypresses to perform some operation, even with tab completion.

The CLI to mySQL is attrocious for example, it seems the only way to fix it is to have a graphical interface.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Rallion]

With a text UI, the user will fly over to Google.

No. They'd like to, but they won't be able to figure out how.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

or an "imagination" for the Grammar Nazis (go GNs, Go)

Actually, it's a spelling mistake, not a grammar mistake; wrong type of Nazi :-P

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

Most geeks are unwashed.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[orangesquid]

Hah, emacs is an operating system ;)

I haven't used dired mode much. Can you give me a URL that would kickstart me into using it? If you can get me hooked on it, I'll love you forever.
--os

Re:GUI is over-rated

[KillShill]

hence you "prefer".

Re:GUI is over-rated

[smittyoneeach]

Emacs has widgets.el, which care not a fig whether you're in a terminal or graphical.
"All hail the power of Emacs' name, let vi users prostates fall..."

Re:GUI is over-rated

[myowntrueself]

Well, google found this, which seems like a good start;
http://jamesthornton.com/emacs/chapter/emacs_31.ht ml

Then this one has some useful tips;
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs/DiredPower

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Waffle Iron]

I agree, there are cases where the CLI works better, but there are also cases where GUIs work better too. Tell me how to select and manipulate 10 dissimiliarly named files at the same time in a directory with 100 files in, on the commandline?

There's always full-screen text console apps like Midnight Commander, which resides somewhere between a GUI and the CLI. I probably use bash to navigate files 70% of the time, a GUI file manager 20%, and Midnight Commander 10%. Each has its own uses: CLI when you're going to run commands on single files; GUI when you're going to lightly browse, run a default app, and and move a couple of things around (which is probably what non-geeks do most of the time), and Midnight Commander when you need to do some heavy-duty reorganizing. In my experience, MC is even better at picking out lots of files, probably because the selections are "stickier" and don't get lost by an accidental mouse click.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[bit01]

... but a GUI selection ability is much faster.

Not entirely clear. Wouldn't be if the number of files is long or in separate folders (requiring scrolling etc.). For your example a cut/copy/paste command line equivalent might be something like:

• fcopy file1 file2 ... - Remember file selection.
• fcut file1 file2 ... - Remember file selection and remember to delete them.
• fadd file1 file2 ... - Add file selection to existing selection.
• fpaste - Paste file selection in current directory and delete source if necessary.

Verbose cp/mv/cd in other words.

Could be used for interaction between GUI and CLI app's though and copy/cut/paste can manipulate objects other than files.

---

Copyright is a privilege, not a right.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[mabinogi]

Nooooo, now we have Nazi Nazis!

Re:GUI is over-rated

[jesterzog]

A text interface is the WORST interface to give somebody who's never used the system. If a GUI is designed well, you can tell a user what their goal is and they'll work it otu. With a text UI, the user will fly over to Google.

Doesn't Google already have a text UI? That is, between all of the graphical white space around the sides of where the user actually types the text explaining what they want.

I would have classified the Google interface as a very well designed text interface. Consequently, I'm not sure if it's worth ruling out text UI's as a rule, simply because most of those that currently exist are expert ones and probably aren't suited to a beginner.

If you could sit a new user in front of a computer and say to them "type what you want", and it worked correctly, it would be one of the most straightforward interfaces for many people to understand. Coincidentally, this is almost exactly what Google aims to do, and their technology for doing it is pretty good.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Beetle B.]

Agreed. Some people may call Midnight Commander a GUI (or partly one), but no one will deny that it is fully text based.

I can select random files using just the cursor keys with it, and copy/move/delete them faster than anyone who uses a mouse based file utility.

Re:GUI is over-rated

[SA Stevens]

and also, there are very few (any?) server apps that would benefit from a gui.

I don't really have an imigination but I cannot think of one off hand.

It's a second hand 'benefit,' but where would httpd be without gui-based browsers connecting to it?

Re:GUI is over-rated

[jc42]

Isn't a text config preferred by ALL admins?

Indeed. I've been involved in a number of network-management projects. In all of them, we've eventually had discussions of an interesting phenomenon: When you watch network admins in action, and a problem occurs, they invariably (and instantly) abandon the fancy GUI tools on their workstations. They open up 2 or 3 text windows and start typing commands.

If you talk to them about it, you'll find that their attitude is "Oh, those fancy GUI things are for impressing suits and lusers. They don't do anything useful. To diagnose and fix problems, you have to use the tools that work, and those are all text-based."

While generally agreeing with this, I'd also have to admit that I've written a number of GUI tools that admins grab and use when they see them in action. One is a simple tcl tool whose window contains N lines, each one running a ping subprocess. You enter a hostname or IP address in one cell, the ping happens at S-second intervals, and the line shows the results. The response times are colored to show the delay, changing from green to yellow to red as the delay gets longer.

But note that this "GUI" tool shows nothing but text. It's merely a front end for N repeating ping commands, with color used to indicate problems. You could do the same thing in N text windows. The GUI is used merely to package this in a convenient (and compact) form. So it's using the GUI for the one thing that a text window isn't very good at: running a flock of background commands and summarizing their output. Also, it reduces the needed screen space, unlike most GUI tools that waste screen space. And it's nothing very special; any tcl hacker could turn it out in half an hour or so.

Someone else has pointed out that google does the same thing. Their main page is in fact a purely text-oriented interface. The GUI is used minimally, to get the text on your screen. And google works just about as well from lynx as from a GUI browser.

The real advantage of a GUI, from a "power user" viewpoint, is that it lets you run N text windows together, and resize them on the fly. This is better than N dumb terminals. But aside from this, most GUI tools don't lead to increased productivity. They're just pretty pictures, aimed at people who can't type and can only point with one or two fingers. That's fine for selling computers to such people. But it's not really great for someone with full use of all their fingers (or brain).

Re:GUI is over-rated

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything selecting 10 files out of 100 (similar names or not) is EASIER in a command line.

In a GUI it has to draw 100 icons onscreen! You have to look at them! That's a mess.

Sure, you can type in the name and it will select the nearest match... But isn't that exactly the same as tab completion?

Re:GUI is over-rated

[conteXXt]

Oh guis have their place.

But does anyone ADMIN apache with a gui?

oh my god

[nomadic]

Slashdot linking to an actually interesting article? What's going on here?

As a side note, yes, the article is refreshingly non-dogmatic, but it is a BIT unfair to use a KDE screen to represent X in the "GUIs of the 80's" section. They really could have found an old copy of an early windows manager, then screenshotted that...

Re:oh my god

[RoLi]

Actually anybody who has been on the arstechnica forums knows that the author is a Linux-hater, so of course that was to be expected.

Of course he puts KDE (which was started 1996) in the "other GUIs from the 80s" section so that it doesn't show up in the "modern" GUI section.

Re:oh my god

[Anonymous Coward]

The only difference would have been the date stamp.

I hate to break it to you, but in terms of technology, KDE is one step ahead of banging the rocks together.

Re:oh my god

[nomadic]

Strange, I would have assumed the opposite ("X was so far ahead of the competition, look")

Re:oh my god

[dickrichardv8]

I agree, the X Vindowing managers advanced in stages too. I would have liked to have seen twm, fvwm, mvwm, (and some Unix window managers that I never even seen) as well.

Douglas Engelbart!

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly an american icon!

Thank god for dupes

[morgandelra]

I mean, I was thinking that maybe the /. editors actually read /. but have had my faith restored in thier ability to dupe a story withen days of its orginial posting. If we are lucky, it might get posted again next week!

Re:Thank god for dupes

[Craig_P92669]

Hate to tell you this, but this has been a dupe since the 30's.

Gui?

[Primal_theory]

What are they talking about!?! These don't look very gui at all! They are all pretty hard looking to me!

Re:30s gui? now i know what those win32*.* files a

[Craig_P92669]

But on what computer hardware would that have been running on?

Acer

A Slashdot History of The GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

...As taken place in IRC

maoepdmz: apple invent gui, m$ stealz it
CHRIS: FAG STFU... XEROX MADE FIRST gui
maoepdmz: no
jay: microsoft made the gui truly successful
CHRIS: WTF
maoepdmz: STFU JAY FAGG0t
*** jay has been kicked (Suck Bill's cock)
CHRIS: MY DAD WORKS FOR APPLE, HE WAS THERE WHEN THEY MADE THE GUI FOR LISA AND STEVE JOBS CREATED THE MOUSE
maoepdmz: raelly?
CHRIS: YEAH
maoepdmz: so xerox are liars
CHRIS: HELLS YEAH THEY TOTALLY RIPPED IT FROM APPLES
maoepdmz: wow
gorbulon_neo_matrix21: u all fags, linux had the first gui in 1983... its called x windows system, idiots
CHRIS: NO, UNIX MADE THAT
maoepdmz: chris do u have unix
CHRIS: YES.. ITS L33t
maoepdmz: can i see screenshot?
CHRIS: NO

Re:A Slashdot History of The GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

Real IRC clients put angle brackets around nicks. None of those wussy IM-ish colons.

Re:A Slashdot History of The GUI

[HG2]

Gooo Chris!

Apple bought it from PARC

[unassimilatible]

Apple ripped off the idea from PARC" is overly simplistic

How about, "Apple bought some ideas from Xerox for millions in cash and stock?"

This "Apple ripped off PARC" thing is nonsense. Just because the PARC group didn't like that their company sold the GUI rights doesn't make it a rip-off.

Bought and paid for.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like MS DOS was "bought and paid for". More like EXPLOITED.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

Same for Office. "Bought and Paid for".

Same for AutoRoute. "Bought and Paid for".

Same for Axatapa. "Bought and Paid for".

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[As Seen On VT]

Once we'd bought the GUI from PARC and started to develop it, loads of Xerox engineers started to jump ship and move to Apple - we were where the action was at. This was a hard time for most of us old timers, the PARC engineers were smelly, had facial hair and a tendency to work naked (a very confronting sight).

Acceptance of the new engineers did slowly grow though. I remember the turning point was when in a weekly meeting where we showed off the latest advances in ASCII porn - a vital part of Apple's plan to get computers into every bedroom - the PARC guys demoed a system of multiple 'windows' containing 4-bit Grayscale photorealistic porn!

It took a minute to get over the fact that they had used themselves as models, but Steve immediately saw the potential and that won us over they quickly.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

*blank stare* o_O

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[NutscrapeSucks]

This "Microsoft ripped off Apple" thing is nonsense.

Just because Apple later changed their minds about licencing the Mac technology to Microsoft in return for a word processor doesn't make it a rip-off.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[KillShill]

it means they didn't invent it. they bought it at the xerox flea market.

rip-off can usually mean two things :

1: it was stolen

2: it was a blatant copy (as if thats a bad thing)

but in this case it also means that it wasn't a home grown project.

people really have to get off the rediculous bandwagon that copying is bad.

it is THE way that the human species has lived for the past millennia. they copy/learn/share info/data/ideas.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[cahiha]

Licensing something doesn't give you the moral right to claim credit for its invention. Do a Google search for "xerox parc" or "engelbart" or "xerox alto" on apple.com; the lack of attribution and credit given by Apple to these pioneers is embarrassing. Unfortunately, that kind of arrogance and lack of credit continues to this day; the claims accompanying Tiger are more of the same.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[john82]

How about, "Apple bought some ideas from Xerox for millions in cash and stock?"

Bzzt. Still wrong.

The accurate statement would be that some things started at Xerox, some at Apple, and some occured simultaneously. One common thread is the late Jef Raskin. Raskin's Computer Science thesis (in 1967) took the position that computer interfaces should be graphical. Note that would be some 17 YEARS before the Mac appeared and some time before much of the work at Palo Alto.

As a professor at UCSD, Raskin was a visiting scholar at PARC where one would expect there was a bit of a mutual admiration society. Raskin and the folks at PARC were on the same wavelength. To be fair, one might wonder if the work at PARC may have owed something both to Raskin's thesis, and also to his occasional presence in the labs.

Following his move to Apple, Raskin apparently curtailed his visits to PARC. But it was Raskin who got Jobs interested in things UI and the work at PARC. For more on this, check out this article by Raskin.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to strongly disagree with you. Before strong IP the musical arts were limited to things like Rachmaninov, John Coltraine, Bach and Louis Armstrong. Now we have the deep musings of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[john82]

Ah Slashdot...

Never let the facts get in the way of righteous indignation.

Can I get an "Amen" from Brother William?

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[ClosedSource]

"How about, "Apple bought some ideas from Xerox for millions in cash and stock?""

This is a common myth on Slashdot. Xerox never licensed their GUI technology to Apple. That's why they sued Apple for violation of copyright.

As I've described before, it was common in those days for a company to sue another over the "look and feel" of the product. The theory was that copying the behavior of a product violated the copyright.

This was exactly the same argument Apple made when trying to sue MS. Neither Xerox nor Apple could make their case.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Reimer "RIPPED OFF" the work of others and reports on it? Any dumb ass can do that.

Is this a programmatic breakthrough or good work in programming? NO!

Newsflash - Reimer can't even program, has NO degree or experience as a programmer in this field either!

What is a nobody who can't even do the job doing in this forum as an article?

Any dumb-ass can do that.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, wrong.

What do you want from Jeremy Reimer? He has no degree in this field, or professional experience either.

What is this 'article' of his (spelled sideways - spitting back ideas we already know about) doing in the developer section here anyways?

Jeremy Reimer's just attempting to be some 'author' about programming, which is hilarious - he can't even do the job himself.

He cant even get the article's ideas and statements right!

Typical 'arstechnica' quality, none whatsoever, no creativity, originality, or accuracy either.

Re:Apple bought it from PARC

[Anonymous Coward]

The person who wrote this, Jeremy Reimer, doesn't even have professional experience in this field, nor does he possess a degree in it or certification of any type... what do you expect from him? He is an arstechnica forums member. They talk alot, produce little or nothing (most the latter) & recite the words of others to sound "Smart" & as usual, end up sounding VERY dumb as you all have noted.

Information database?

[rcbarnes]

During the war he had worked as a radar operator, so he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them.

Wikipedia anyone?

xerox

[jlebrech]

serves xerox right for now cashing in on their own idea!! altho they revolutionised laser printing.

Re:xerox

[Volvogga]

As well as scanning one's own ass.

Ah, but what about Quarterdeck's Desqview?

[mridley]

I always thought Desqview (and Desqview/X) was pretty cool. Even though I've been a Windows user since '87/'88 I did play with Desqview/X and thought the idea of having an X server built into your PC GUI was a pretty neat idea. Even if I didn't totally understand what X was at the time.

And yet even this is simplified a good bit

[mcc]

They go directly from Smalltalk/PARC to Apple/LISA as if nothing happened in between. There actually were a decent number of GUI/windowing systems in the late 70s / early 80s, and a number of pre-X attempts at making a UNIX GUI, that time has totally forgotten. PERQ is the only one I can seem to find evidence of the existence of on Google offhand. If you can somehow find a copy of the book containing this history of GUIs written in 1986, it's rather fascinating...

Re:And yet even this is simplified a good bit

[sydb]

I used to have a PERQ II. They were made by ICL. It was a washing machine sized brown box; it was heavier than a washing machine though. The screen was a remarkably clear black & white portrait job. It ran Unix/X and it came with a copy of the Bell Labs manuals. I believe it came from a local university via a couple of friends.

The "mouse" was a "puck" - no ball it was used with a tablet (like a Wacom). The puck had a bit of transparent plastic at the top with cross-hairs - I presume so you could trace out a drawing. IIRC the buttons were different colours.

This was my first exposure to Unix and I loved it. My biggest regret, other than falling in love with the wrong woman, was taking this to the dump six years ago because I had no room for it. Now I have lots of room :-(

Re:And yet even this is simplified a good bit

[pipingguy]

Like this?

Re:And yet even this is simplified a good bit

[sydb]

The crosshair bit on the puck is the same but I don't remember all the colored "buttons" on the tablet, or the "ribs" on the puck. But my memory is not what it used to be...

Re:And yet even this is simplified a good bit

[SimHacker]

Methodology of Window Systems is a great book. It had an article by James Gosling and David Rosenthal, about a PostScript based window system they wrote called SunDew, which was eventually named NeWS.

-Don

Re:And yet even this is simplified a good bit

[Ratbert42]

From 1988, I remember AT&T 3B2's with 5620 displays and mice.

And I remember PLATO running on Control Data 721's.

Oh shit

[boomgopher]

Don't show the Gnome devs this:

Alto File Manager

it might end up being the next version of Nautilus...

Re:Oh shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that gets them to change the current file manager is a good thing.

A Pictorial History of the Apple Desktop Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

A Pictorial History of the Apple Desktop Interface 1979 - 2000

Thank you

[sahrss]

A "thank you" goes out to the author of this article, from me. At my college, we have two different version of OS history: The one where Windows was the first real OS, and the one where Linux is the newbie version of the first real OS, which is really UNIX. (note this was sarcasm)

Those are the two versions our Win32/UNIX teachers preach. Neither bothers to look at the facts or the history of any other OS. *growl*

I'll be showing this to some of them who aren't totally hopeless.

Re:Thank you

[MerlinTheWizard]

The one where Windows was the first real OS, and the one where Linux is the newbie version of the first real OS

This is a joke, right?

A link is worth a thousand pictures.

[Anonymous Coward]

GUI screenshots.
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interface s

Englebart's famous 1968 demo.
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Acorn Archimedes GUI
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~lrtc/computers/acorn_ro/ acorn/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A225785

Knowledge Navigator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator

Apple II GS
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/computers/IIg s.html

BeBox
http://www.bebox.nu/history.php

8-1/2: The Plan 9 Window system
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/8%BD/8%BD.pdf

Genera
http://www.geocities.com/mparker762/toys.html

Video Interviews of Early Pioneers
http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/

GUI News
http://interfacelift.com/news/

ZUI's
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/applications/in dex.shtml

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Smalltalk

[Umbral Blot]

I had forgotten how impressive small talk was, and still is. For more on the history of smalltalk you can go here

Google DNS?

[caluml]

Anyone having problems resolving Google? It's down for me.

bash-2.05b$ dig www.google.co.uk

; <<>> DiG 9.2.3 <<>> www.google.co.uk
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 58697
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.co.uk. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.co.uk. 306348 IN CNAME www.google.com.
www.google.com. 298 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
l.google.com. 599 IN SOA ns1.google.com.l.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 1115309515 900 900 1800 900

;; Query time: 1 msec
;; SERVER: w.x.y.z#53(w.x.y.z)
;; WHEN: Sat May 7 23:50:18 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 143

bash-2.05b$

It's the same from work too - so it's not my DNS config. I think someone has typed something wrong at Google.

Re:Google DNS?

[radon28]

same problem here.. non-existent domain.

Re:Google DNS?

[zoloto]

It's down for me as well, however, for some reason... my GMail Drive explorer extension is still functioning so I can transfer files to and from.

Glitch perhaps? I was just a minute short of looking at the DNS query... Could this be a possible DNS attack on (one of) our beloved G?

~zoloto

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit google *IS* down!

It is the day of reckoning! Repent sinners!

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's the same from work too - so it's not my DNS config. I think someone has typed something wrong at Google."

Yup, me too.

Re:Google DNS?

[flowerp]

Its down for me too. Funny, I just noticed 2 minutes ago, then I came across this post.

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It's busted for me on my home ISP & @ my university.

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work from here; works from my box a few miles off (telnet HTTP request). So - DNS issue, yes.

Re:Google DNS?

[caluml]

If you set your DNS server(s) to any of the Google ones, all is OK.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.google.com. 345600 IN A 216.239.32.10
ns2.google.com. 345600 IN A 216.239.34.10
ns3.google.com. 345600 IN A 216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com. 345600 IN A 216.239.38.10

But the SOA record definitely looks like someone forgot a fullstop.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
l.google.com. 896 IN SOA ns1.google.com.l.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 1115309515 900 900 1800 900

That "ns1.google.com.l.google.com." looks pretty ugly.

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone having problems resolving Google?

Yes from Oxford, UK, no from my accounts in Adelaide (SA, Aus.) and Ann Arbor (MI, US).

Re:Google DNS?

[spitzak]

Broken here, too: unknown host www.google.com

However just "google.com" does resolve (to 216.239.39.99 for me). But trying to load that seems to just redirect to www.google.com so it fails.

It's a sign of the apocalypse!

Re:Google DNS?

[caluml]

Thanks for the "Offtopic", mods. Nice one.
If it's working for you, it might be that your records are still cached?

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the "Offtopic", mods. Nice one.

The topic: history of GUIs. Your post: Google's DNS temporarily down. Spot the difference & enjoy life in karma hell.

Re:Google DNS?

[houseofzeus]

It's back up for me as of 9:16 AM Australian Eastern Standards Time (Was out for around half an hour I think?)

Re:Google DNS?

[Jsutton1027w]

Yeah, I was seeing the same thing for several minutes. Then, it seemed to come back, partially. That is, google.com itself worked, but all of the second level domain names were down (gmail.google.com, froogle.google.com, news.google.com, etc.). Anyway, this is a moment in history folks, that will live in infamy....

Re:Google DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

i understand parent was possibly an offtopic post .. but it's informative to "geeks" nonetheless .. i wouldnt have run around negative modding it.

Re:Google DNS?

[Danuvius]

How many are getting fired for this? ;) Not even netcraft could resolve google.com for a while.

Re:Google DNS?

[J. Random Luser]

Down? Nah, just taking a little time to load the Mother's Day logo....

Re:Google DNS?

[caluml]

Confirmed.

I sense a great disturbance in the 'net...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is www.google.com down for anyone else? It's not responding to any of the three computers around the house, each with a different ISP. Please post if you can reach this URL. This is not a troll, although it assuredly looks like one.

Re:I sense a great disturbance in the 'net...

[Anyletter]

down for me, too. But GWA seems to be working still. A great disturbance, to be sure.

Re:I sense a great disturbance in the 'net...

[I(rispee_I(reme]

argh, I don't know what GWA is and I can't google it...

Re:I sense a great disturbance in the 'net...

[Anonymous Coward]

GWA stands for Google Web Accelerator. Google's latest piece of software.

Re:I sense a great disturbance in the 'net...

[Frizzle Fry]

Why do you have three computers in your house using different ISP's?

Hoorah!

[__aajqwr7439]

We now have a simple place to point the trolls who insist that Xerox invented the mouse, NEXT invented the dock, and so on.

It's actually worth it to RTFA, even if (as pointed out) it's not textbook-thorough...

DN

Re:Hoorah!

[Paleomacus]

The article is good. I also enjoyed this actual footage of the '68 demo at SRI.

[warning footage is RealAudio stream]

R.I.P. Google

[ArsenneLupin]

An error occurred while loading http://www.google.com/
Unknown host www.google.com

Does this mean that MSN won the search-engine war?

Re:R.I.P. Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Same for Hotmail. "Bought and Paid for".

Re:R.I.P. Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is b0rked for me to. Dammit. Now I have to see how truly craptacular the other search engines are.

Re:R.I.P. Google

[ArsenneLupin]

Google is back. But the AdSense banners are still gone. Could it be that google caught a bad case of mesothelioma? The weird thing is sometimes the ads do display, but clicking on them leads to nowhere...

Re:R.I.P. Google

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Google works now, but Gmail is down for the moment.

Re:R.I.P. Google

[DirtyDuck]

Most (if not all) of the other services (groups, news etc) are still down.

WTF happened?

Re:R.I.P. Google

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Adsense can suck my click.

Re:R.I.P. Google

[Dave2 Wickham]

Welcome to modern times, where search engines like AllTheWeb are actually decent. (I use a combination of Google + ATW + MSN search, myself.)

Why?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you thing a 3d interface would be any better? Its like everybody assumed it would be better just because it has a bigger number; the more dimensions the marrier. In real life we see in 2d and have a difficult time perceving the third.

If you want to play around with a 3d interface i recomend 'tdfsb'. (3d file system browser, and yes, its free as in freedom)

Does it have hack value? Fuck yes.
It is practical at all? Fuck no.

Re:Why?!

[Janitha]

But you never know how useful it might get. When the computer systems were first created, no one thought or them to be used for wordprocessing, or surfing the web or games. Same with arpnet, who would have though a couple of decades later it would be used daily by millions to read news, play games, listen to music, download movies, and waste time reading random sites. The possibilities are unlimited, we just know the potential of it yet, as technology progresses, it will come clear. (Same with USB, at the time, they didnt think it would be used so widely)

next generation guis

[zazelite]

... will rely on a rock-solid & well-established foundation of 3D rendering techniques whose relative usage of system resources is at or below that of the rock-solid & well-established foundation of 2D rendering techniques used by today's GUIs.

Sound familiar? This is what Microsoft (among others) is working on. Exploiting the raw processing power of GPUs to create the GUI means the performance hit is minimal for applications, letting them become prettier without getting noticeably slower. Let's hope 'prettier' means 'a better user experience'.

UI engineers have their work cut out for them. Get crackin'.

Re:next generation guis

[Anonymous Coward]

you could at least credit apple for already having many gui elements gpu accelerated already instead of pretending microsoft is the only player.

Re:next generation guis

[DwarfGoanna]

Argh... I know this sounds Apple fanboy-ish, and I know how unpopular that is in moderation =p, but while many others are working on this... Apple has it now. It's called Quartz Extreme (catchy, I know =/).

Maybe it's too soon to tell where they (among others) are going to take it, but the signs from them (and MS) point toward Nowheresville. It just speeds up the same old gui.

Re:next generation guis

[stupidkiwi]

We are getting a Tiger Family pack tomorrow (when you live in the sticks in New Zealand you dont get things on the release date) so I have yet to use it personaally.
There is one use for Quartz Extreme. It offloads more gruntwork from the CPU to the GPU. This frees up the CPU for more useful tasks. This is very Amiga like in basic theory... yes the AMiga used different hardware and GPU's were nothing like todays. But the Amiga stored all files to be displayed like text in the graphics memory (VRAM) so the Graphics processor could work with them directly before sending them to the display chips.
The Amiga had perfectly smooth scrolling text documents. Tiger features perfectly scrolling text documents. Both systems hold the text document in VRAM so the GPU can do its work directly while not stressing the CPU at all.
So as far as I am concerned Tiger may not look different, but the addition of Quartz Extreme will help in many small ways that will improve the overall quality of the user experience.

cli is good

[Anonymous Coward]

But this is better.. ;)

Love of the GUI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oberon OS & GUI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_operating_syst em

one word

[bird603568]

Porn

Re:GOOGLE DOWN?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, google's been down worldwide for like 20 minutes

Missing quite a bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think?

Google DNS-IPs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google
http://216.239.37.99/

http://216.239.39.99/

http://216.239.37.99/

Doom in CLI

[Rallion]

> Forward 4 meters
> Turn left 7 degrees
> Fire

Re:Doom in CLI

[NanoGator]

"> Forward 4 meters
> Turn left 7 degrees
> Fire"

Doom in Linux:

> forward 4 meters
> error
> frwrd 4 mtrs
> error
> man doom
> error
> @#$#@$#@
> error
> man Doom ......

Re:Doom in CLI

[fredrikj]

FOOM!

Re:Doom in CLI

[Citizen of Earth]

How voice recognition would integrate with a GUI environment [JJS]:

Left. Left. Left stop. Stop! Right. Stop. Now down. Stop. Click-click. Fuck! ... Click-click. ... Click-click-click-click-dammit! Shit! Up. Up-up-up. Stooooopppp!!! Left. Stop. Click-click. ... Fuck!

Re:Doom in CLI

[noidentity]

I tried that but I got an unexpected message before I was even done typing:

> Forward 4 meters
> Turn lef
Fragged

Did I type something wrong?

Re:Doom in CLI

[WWWWolf]

Well, you can already play Quake as a text adventure...

A grunt is standing here, armed with a shotgun and looking rather surly.

The Grunt's shotgun shoots across your shoulder, hitting you for 5 points. It's only a flesh wound.

>attack grunt with shotgun
You hit the Grunt taking off 10 from his health.

The Grunt's shotgun hits you right in the thigh, taking off 10 points. That could have been much worse.

anything but reality is oversimplified

[fermion]

I did not read the article, but having lived throught it, and watch the technology develop, let me say that it is difficult to say what happened and who did what

What is true is that MS helpd mov the market from IBM and mainframes and minis to micro computers. The computers were not advanced. The CLI sucked, when compared to what one could do on a mainframe. Command completion, complex pipes, etc. MS Dos and Apple DOS and ProDOS, even CP/M, were terrible inadequate. For anything but spreadsheets and writing, my micro was a dumb terminal.

And MS was gaining market share and Apple had failed to reach the public with the Apple ///. They had to do something. That something was to find the next big thing and bring it to market. Yes, Xerox did a lot of the initial work. We owe Xerox for much in technology, even beyond computers, and I think everyone knows that.

But Apple bought some of the technologies, designed a machnine, and brought it to market. And let me tell you, compared to the shit CLI before it, it was wonderful. There were still things you could not do, which previously could be done with a simple .bat or basic program, but what could be done overshadowed all of it. I was still running some stuff on remote minis using CLI.

Once Apple proved the technology, MS developed a competing technolgy over the next 5-10 years, and took over the market on commodity computers. In that time, we enjoyed a GUI honeymoon. We were in a world with computers limited by the GUI interface and binary files, and layers of technology to compensate for those limitations. MS is thriving in that enviroment, minimizing the command line, and creating random file formats. Just like they were doing in the early 80's.

And now, just like back then, Apple is in trouble. So one again it looked outside itself to find the solution, in the form of BSD. In creates a hybrid of the GUI and CLI interface so the user can choose. The big guys have always done this, just look at the old Sparc stations. They were doing 10 years ago what the Mac does now. But, once again, Apple has put it into a box that is accesible to much of the population. It is not groundbreaking, it is just that the technology has become affodable, just like 20 years ago. And in 5-10 years MS will create a similiar system that 'costs' half as much.

Re:anything but reality is oversimplified

[Anonymous Coward]

"The CLI sucked, when compared to what one could do on a mainframe."

HAH! In 1985 I was a mainframe systems programmer. I was bitching and moaning because the limited set of utilities IBM provided (IEBGENER, IEBCOPY, etc.) was grossly inferior to what I had available under CP/M.

Don't even get me STARTED on JCL. And TSO CLISTs were hardly better.

Who's first? Doesn't matter

[starlabs]

It doesn't matter who invented the GUI first... what you should be asking instead - who popularized it?

Who made the key step from being merely a nerdy tech tool, to a groundbreaking interface to the rest of the non-techie world?

Re:Who's first? Doesn't matter

[stupidkiwi]

In Eurpope, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand, that company was Commodore with the Amiga. The Amiga outsold all other machines in most of these countries especially in the home and Graphics markets.

Ever heard of Xanadu?

[rmallico]

http://xanadu.com.au/ted/ This guy is one of those folks who happened to have gone through the growing pains of the gui, hypertext world as it came to be (at least form its inception to its current state) i could say he is my crazy uncle but... 1. he is definately not crazy 2. he and my aunt just won't marry (but i still think of him as one helluva uncle) 3. he's pretty cool..

Re:Ever heard of Xanadu?

[J. Random Luser]

and he seems to have had a lot to do with the invention of linkrot.

Douglas Adams is missing too...

[Ron Harwood]

Heck, the HHGTG had a GUI and took voice commands... and the radio play was in the late 70's... :)

Good point

[northcat]

I don't know whether this was parent's intention or not, but the link proves a very good point: There has been very less innovation (and change) since modern, idiot-friendly, GUI computers became popular. In the link, there has been very little change from the original Apple/Mac GUI (from the around 1980) to the current Mac OS X GUI except for the current GUI being more colourful and more eye-candy. In other words, a better-looking theme. (If back then computers were as powerful as the ones now, then the GUI would already been as eye-candy as now.)

Re:Good point

[cnettel]

I actually want to disagree here. A static picture is quite alike, but take things like quick searching, but also "tool tips"/autocompletion. Yes, they rely on eye candy, but the point is that you can just point or write ahead and the computer will provide you with some kind of useful information while you do so.

Heck, even a toolbar may be put in this category. It's a shortcut, it was available within the GUI anyway, but it's pretty useful. And the context menu, no matter what platform, often comes in quite handily. All these are incremental things. They wouldn't have worked on the original Mac. Putting them in on the original Mac, even with the processing power of today, would have meant serious additional development work.

We're still relying on the same metaphor, but the execution is far better. The presence of the web browser as a general way of presenting jsut about every kind of material is also, IMHO, significant enough to view it as a real change in the user interface. Not in the graphical way, but in how you interact with the GUI and what you expect from it. It's the interface between you and the machine, not the display alone.

Re:Good point

[Lally Singh]

While I'd disagree to the characterization of OS X as little more than eye candy and color, the general idea that GUI development has flattened out is about right. But there are some good reasons for it:

• Increasing cost of change - Both users and vendors have lots invested in their current systems, in training, software, and installed base. Both have more to lose in case of failure. In the older days, if it didn't work, each box was a new platform, and you could trash that box if it failed.
• Reasonably Good - For what people expect out of computers, the current generation of GUIs are decent at providing just that. People can often learn in a few days what they need to know to use what they want out of a computer.
• Increasing difficulty for innovation - Major shifts in the way a GUI is done is going to require some strong cognative leaps (e.g. 3D UIs, if they're going to be more than a cute gimmick, will need lots of R&D before they get as straighforward, efficient, and easy to use as 2D GUIs). The next generation of user interfaces will be a significant jump forward, and until someone can make that leap, the rest of the industry will just evolve the status quo. Not a bad thing, just a normal part of a technology's evolution.

So yeah, we'll have lots of evolution until the next revolution. Looking to Tiger or Longhorn for anything more is a waste of effort.

forgot this link... info from ibiblio...

[rmallico]

http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/nelson.html

All the quotes

[BohKnower]

Too many quotes in the article, I'm lost!

Re:All the quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about ALL the author of this article can do, in Jeremy Reimer.

He doesn't even have professional experience as a programmer, and has no degree in this field.

What's his 'work' (rehashing of the work of others) doing in the developer section here, period? It's no breakthru information. We're already aware of it.

Jeremy Reimer's a typical "arstechnica boob/nobody" trying to sound smart, but ends up talking out his ass making mistakes through it.

I did not know arstechnica put up information from unqualified idiots like Jeremy Reimer who has no degree or professional experience in this field period.

Term papers anyone? PUT 'EM UP @ SLASHDOT!

Might as well - Reimer does, and gets a lousy grade as is judging by the feedback here on it.

Good article; missing stuff

[postbigbang]

It's a nice historical piece on GUIs. It lacks lots of the drivers for things: vector graphics and math co-processors; how CPU and bus design influences graphics; multi-tasking/multi-threading and its impact on GUI design; the advent of the (awful) browser; the Unix schisms and X developments; other window managers and their designs; how the awfulness of small, low-res monitors impacted GUI design; memory mapping, bit mapping vs drawing real lines in the kinescope fashion.

Also glossed: Desqview, RHM, and other neo-GUIs. MIA: sub-PC GUIs in monochrome (Palm and Newton) and other non-traditional form factors. But overall-- good article. I guess he needs a book to do it all justice.

Re:Good article; missing stuff

[iamlucky13]

I guess he needs a book to do it all justice.

Yeah...8 pages. This is an arstechnica article, not a freaking history book.

Re:Good article; missing stuff

[stupidkiwi]

I agree. The Amiga may have been only the first consumer level machine to offer true multitasking, but its bus design with its multiple coprocessors meant it pioneered the multithreading game... only because any program had to send seperate threads to operate.

Rather omissive article

[dstillz]

This article was rather omissive, in my opinion.

Showing an early KDE screenshot in no way represents the 10 years of X history that came before that, nor does it speak to the competitive features of early X Windows software, such as network transparency.

Where were the 8 major versions of the Mac OS that appeared between System 1 and OS X?

The article doesn't even touch on Windows XP, except to show it on the final timeline!

Re:Rather omissive article

[theguyfromsaturn]

There is no mention either of the "multiple desktops". I don't know who invented them, I only know that Windows does not have them. And it's such a wonderful concept. I tend to keep two file manager windows always open in one of them, and switch to that desktop to do all my dragging and dropping thingies. I'm sure other people find it useful when heavily multitasing, and it should have deserved mention.

Re:Rather omissive article

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga had "screens", which were similar (but not identical) to virtual desktops. In the amiga screenshot in the article, you can see buttons in the top right-hand corner, these flicked you to other screens in a stack. You could also drag the screen down by the title bar to reveal the screen below it (the "Enlightenment" WM has a a poor imitation of this feature).

One key difference is that on the Amiga, screens were named and associated with applications. A version or two after the GUI version pictured, "public screens" were introduced. These allowed multiple applications to share screens. Most serious applications that used GUI toolkits like MUI supported them. If I had a public screen called "internet", say, with I had associated my browser and email client, when either or both of those applications were open, the screen was summoned into existence in the stack of screens and contained them much like a virtual desktop (and the screen went away again when no applications associated with it were open).

Re:Rather omissive article

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point on network transparency.

AFAIK, there was very little evolution GUI-wise from MacOS 1 to 9... Please correct me.

XP? Come on... Here I *know* there was no evolution. Changing button style and colors is hardly a new paradigm!

Re:Rather omissive article

[jc42]

I was also rather bemused by the characterization of the X Windows sytem as something "... that attempted to mimic the appearance of Microsoft Windows but still allow access to the power of the Unix shell underneath."

The mistake here is also explained by the introductory remark: "Just before the end of the 1980s, new GUIs started appearing on Unix workstations ..."

In 1984, well before the end of the 1980s, I was working in an office at MIT just down the hall from where Jim Gettys was building the first versions of X Xindows, with the help of a lot of us guinea pigs as alpha and beta testers. This was at a time when MS Windows was in its early releases, and was rather feeble. We didn't much have DOS boxes in our offices, and it's pretty clear that MS's ideas just weren't relevant or interesting in the X effort. Nobody wanted a window system that worked like that. The Apple and Sun boxes were a lot more interesting, though the attitude at MIT was mostly "We can do a lot better than that." (Of course, so could Apple and Sun, given a bit of time.) There were also a couple of Apollo boxes around, which were brought up in many discussions.

In any case, this is a case where TFA gets the timeline and the borrowing rather wrong. And it's wrong in the usual way, attributing ideas to MS that were actually developed elsewhere, only to appear in MS's products some time later.

Re:Rather omissive article

[dstillz]

Interesting. You ought to write more about early X history.

I'm just a young (20) geek who grew up in a house with techie parents and older sisters.

The first computer that I got to play with a lot ran MS-DOS 3.3 and a 1.x OS/2. I quickly learned that if I wanted to get anything done, I had to click the "DOS" icon.

I remember games like Dark Castle on the old, one-piece beige Macs, and how it took me a couple of weeks to figure out that unless I exited programs from their menus, they were still running, even if they had no open windows. Nobody bothered to explain MultiFinder to me.

I remember Windows 3.x being a joke (but it came with good games, like Taipei and Ski Free), because I had seen an X terminal at my dad's work. He showed me how applications were attached to terminal windows, and told me that the keyboard, monitor, and mouse I was looking at were actually one set of many that were in separate people's offices but all hooked up to the same computer. And they could be used at the same time!

I remember being much more impressed by X, because it really had multiple programs running at once, that you could switch between with no lag. And because, unlike a computer I had to share with a mother and sisters, lots of people could be using the system at the same time.

I definitely don't think X copied MS until the MS-a-like WMs came along, in any way, shape or form. It was a different beast.

Re:Rather omissive article

[dstillz]

Try running XP without accelerated graphics and you'll see where its improvements lie. The Mac OS evolved quite a bit. With Switcher, it gained the ability to run more than one program simultaneously and to switch between them seamlessly. The MultiFinder took that paradigm all the way. Over the years, memory and file management changed, and the way windows behaved and were drawn changed. The Mac OS changed just as much as Windows did. Even if the only milestones that the article touched on were System 6, Mac OS 7.5, and Mac OS 8.1, it should have talked about what each of those releases brought to the table.

Enlightenment

[spauldo]

One thing I would have added in there was an entry on enlightement - back in the day, it was the first window manager that allowed almost complete customization and theming. I'd say it's probably behind the drive to 'prettify' GUIs that has only become popular in the commercial world in the past few years (os X, xp (to an extent, anyway), other window managers for X). I can still remember the first time I saw someone running E - it blew my mind.

Also, did anyone else notice that the one entry for X was listed in the 80's, but showed a screenshot of KDE? It should have been wm or one of the early window managers. Or maybe twm at the newest.

Re:Enlightenment

[Anonymous Coward]

> One thing I would have added in there was an entry on enlightement - back in the day, it was the first window manager that allowed almost complete customization and theming

Disagree. MUI was extraordinarily configurable, and predates enlightenment and perhaps even Linux (not 100% sure there - MUI was from around 91 or 92 I think).

You could load themes that applied bitmaps or colors to anything at all, on a global, per application, or per element basis. Each screen (similar to workspaces in modern window managers) could have its own theme.

Poor description of X windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty feeble description of X-windows-- no mention of the fact that X is network aware (or network transparent); i.e. X clients do not need to be running on the same machine as the X server they display to. This was a revolutionary idea at the time and allowed for the X terminal thin-client architecture. This is STILL a pretty radical idea for folks in the Windows world...

Maybe VNC also deserves a mention?

Example From the Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Try rapidly moving, say, an Explorer window over top of a Word document. If your eyes are very fast, you can still see which parts of the window are redrawn and which are not.

Too bad I use linux you insensitive clod!

That was a poorly-written license

[unassimilatible]

Apple screwed up the license when it wanted MS to deveop programs for the Mac OS. Bad lawyering yes, but Jobs and Co. never intended that MS be able to copy the "look and feel" of the Mac OS.

Unfortunately, their licensing agreement let MS do just that, and the rest is history.

There was, however, no "changing of minds."

Re:That was a poorly-written license

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well, the post was a little joke, so don't read too much into it -- Although PARC also later argued "bad lawyering" and tried to sue Apple over their deal.

The vast majority of the "Look and Feel" of a GUI system is not 'intellectual property', and therefore was not Apple's to sell anyway.

Re:That was a poorly-written license

[unassimilatible]

Well, the post was a little joke, so don't read too much into it

Yeah, I figgered that.

The vast majority of the "Look and Feel" of a GUI system is not 'intellectual property', and therefore was not Apple's to sell anyway.

Not sure if this is a value judgement or a legal one. The look and feel claim failed because of the license, according to the jist of the judge's decision. In other words, Apple might have had an IP claim, the judge said, but the poorly-written license trumped it. I have no doubt that the idea of menus, icons, and other GUI elements could have been patented, and of course look and feel can be part of trade dress (see: Coca-Cola, Prestone bottles).

I guess we'll never know what might have been; imagine if you will, MS paying Apple a license fee for its GUI from 1984-2004, only in, the Twilight Zone...

Re:That was a poorly-written license

[NutscrapeSucks]

The Lotus/Borland case went to the supreme court and the result was that look-and-feel, menu structure, and program operation can't be copyrighted, which is what Apple was trying to claim.

Sure patents and trade dress might offer some protection over specific elements, but they are not something that Apple could have used to assert rights over the idea of a graphical interface itself.

I think what made Apple especially angry at themselves is that the contract not only allowed MS to copy UI elements, but also allowed them to "clone" the Mac Toolbox API. Even worse, it allowed MS to turn around and licence the API design to giants like IBM and HP. Apple was much more worried about OS/2 Presentation Manager than Windows at the time.

MS paying Apple a license fee for its GUI from 1984-2004, only in, the Twilight Zone

We lived through the Twilight Zone in the late 80s -- when Apple made you pay through the nose for a GUI computer. Kickass machines, but Apple's margins were upwards of 60%, and their only competitive strategy was to sue everyone. I love the computers, but those weren't really pleasant days, the industry overall was stagnent.

Uh, no

[unassimilatible]

DOS was purchased for $50,000.

Xerox made millions off the Apple deal.

So no, Gates buying DOS isn't "just like" the Apple deal.

You think Xerox would have done anything with it? This is based on all of the shipping, profit-earning products that PARC/Xerox has shipped in the last 20 years? LOL, the Apple deal was likely the most money Xerox has every gotten out of PARC.

I guess we now use the term "exploited" for any deal or job we don't like or approve of?

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

> DOS was purchased for $50,000.

Not quite. Seattle Computing got free copies of MSDOS for a decade -- worth several million dollars. Tim Patterson got hired at Microsoft, and is no doubt a millionare.

One of the first rules of the computer industry is that that the worth of your product is not what it does, but who you can sell it to.

Apple and Xerox

[cahiha]

It is correct to say that Xerox did not invent the GUI. But the article seems to use that as some kind of exonoration of Apple, and that it isn't. The researchers at Xerox made enormous contributions, both to the user-visible aspects of GUIs, as well as to the underlying technologies (OOP, design patterns, etc.). In contrast, the developers at Apple made some moderate, practical improvements to the user-visible aspects of the GUI (although, ironically, in OS X, they are actually picking up more and more of the original Xerox UI design), and they made no contributions at all to the underlying technologies.

And little has changed. The poor foundations of the original MacOS haunted Apple until they finally had to throw out MacOS and start over again with OS X. And what do they do? They base it on NeXT and Objective-C, a system that was pretty nice in the 1980's, but that has never been technologically cutting edge and is pretty much obsolete today as far as software technologies go.

Englebart's demonstration reminds me

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a dual mouse system, five buttons per mouse (one per finger), would be ideal. It would allow chordkeying and dual mousing from a single ergomonimc position. Obviously, this would be an user-chosen setup; it's no keyboard-killer. http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Low-Impact_20Dual_2 0Mice is a similar idea.

Pine Email!

[iamlucky13]

Just four years ago, Pine was still the standard for remote email access at my school. Going from hotmail to that took some getting used to, but now I'm hooked. I can check for new messages in the time it takes Firefox to start up and load the hotmail login page. Of course, I don't even need to touch the mouse. The only downside, in my opinion, is downloading attachments is slightly more complicated, since I have to FTP them.

Of course, progress has a nasty tendency to ruin the best things in this world. This summer, my school is ditching Unix and migrating to Microsoft Exchange. No more Pine. I wonder if we can convince google to offer Pine, or some kind of CLI access, for gmail? Port 23 anyone?

Re:Pine Email!

[Baricom]

Pine speaks IMAP and POP, and there is most likely a port for your operating system. Have you considered installing it locally?

Re:Pine Email!

[iamlucky13]

Very interesting. I had never even thought of investigating that. I'll have to see if I can set that up.

Re:Boycott Microsoft!!! Fight liberal media corrup

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, as a liberal I was kindof worried here, until I realized that all the alternate apps sites listed here are run by just as, if not more, liberal people.

That's because intelligent+educated=liberal, and ignorant+shortsighted=conservative.

On page four of the article...

[Lukesed]

I misread "Twenty Questions" as "Twenty Minutes". It actually made more sense that way.

NEXT generation?

[SuperKendall]

... will rely on a rock-solid & well-established foundation of 3D rendering techniques whose relative usage of system resources is at or below that of the rock-solid & well-established foundation of 2D rendering techniques used by today's GUIs.
Sound familiar?

Why yes. Yes it does. I'm typing on it right now, it's called Tiger.

I'm not sure what the Next Generation GUI looks like, Apple hasn't announced what the next OS release will hold yet. Hopefully Mail.app uses it though and moves beyond its current state.

Smalltalk GUI

[ipoverscsi]

I had no idea that Smalltalk implemented the GUI on the Alto, and all I can say is "wow". That has got to be the most powerful programming concept ever. You've got all the introspection and application-hooking capabilities you can imagine to customize every feature of every application, including the window manager! Of course there was probably no memory protection nor access controls, making it totally useless for today's desktop. But, damn! it would be cool to play with.

Re:Smalltalk GUI

[Cmdr TECO]

I had no idea that Smalltalk implemented the GUI on the Alto

Smalltalk implemented one of the GUIs on the Alto and its descendants. In particular, Star was not written in Smalltalk, as the article implies by describing Smalltalk and then saying "the ability to overlap windows was removed" in Star. Star -- the office suite -- didn't have overlapping windows. Smalltalk did; so did XDE, the development environment for Mesa, the programming language used to write most systems software for the Alto and successors, and so did Interlisp on the same hardware. (Star was the GUI office environment, not the hardware, which was sold with other software; mine was a Lisp machine.)

Obsolete? Not keeping up with trends.

[SuperKendall]

And little has changed. The poor foundations of the original MacOS haunted Apple until they finally had to throw out MacOS and start over again with OS X. And what do they do? They base it on NeXT and Objective-C, a system that was pretty nice in the 1980's, but that has never been technologically cutting edge and is pretty much obsolete today as far as software technologies go.

Now Objective-C I'll grant is a bit of a mixed bag - primarily because of the lack of garbage collection, though autorelease pools are not too bad...

But the NeXT foundation and Objective-C together are actually very pertient to the world we live in today. The very heavy message-passing style of calls actually mirror the growing populartity of message passing in large enterprise systems, such as JMS.

Objective-C is actually where the industry should have gone instead of C++. It's easier to learn and use than C++ (I've done both) and might be a little behind Java or C#, but then again it's also not really been overhauled for a while.

The rapid degree of progress Apple has managed to make in the OS and with other programs is a good demonstrator for how efficient Objective-C can be.

Smalltalk was NOT the first OOP language

[The Lion of Comarre]

From the article:
Smalltalk was the world's first object-oriented programming language, where program code and data could be encapsulated into single units called objects that could then be reused by other programs without having to know the details of the object's implementation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_progr amming
History
...
The first object-oriented programming language was Simula 67, a language designed for making simulations, created by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of the Norwegian Computing Centre in Oslo. (Reportedly, the story is that they were working on ship simulations, and were confounded by the combinatorial explosion of how the different attributes from different ships could affect one another. The idea occurred to group the different types of ships into different classes of objects, each class of objects being responsible for defining its own data and behavior.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula
Simula introduced the object-oriented programming paradigm and thus can be considered the first object-oriented programming language and a predecessor to Smalltalk, C++, Java, and all modern class-based object-oriented languages.

Re:Smalltalk was NOT the first OOP language

[Anonymous Coward]

True- Simula came before Smalltalk, and was an important influence on Smalltalk's design. What made Smalltalk stand out so far ahead of Simula, and what often lead to the confusion about which was the first, was the extent to which the OO paradigm was embraced in Smalltalk- ultimately, to the point that not only was the language OO, but that the environment in which one worked was also the Smalltalk runtime- in essence, a self-contained world in which ordinary users had access to the entirety of the environment, including the very code and tools used to modify that environment while it was living. Everything the user could see, and they could see everything, was represented to the user as a first class object. Even the processes- you have no idea how many times I've wanted to interupt a contemporary OS to find out what on Earth it was up to that was taking so long... in Smalltalk, I can do that, look it over, even reprogram it, and then set it back on its way again. For the historically inclined, I recall that early versions of Squeak were derived from an "unthawed" version of the Apple version of Smalltalk-80 that was originally available for the Lisa. That is one way in which you can get very close to the feel of the Smalltalk that inspired Jobs & co. on their visit to PARC. IIRC, they saw three things that day: the GUI, the Mouse, and Smalltalk... unfortunately, they were so blown away by the first two that it was too much cognitive overload to pick up on the third.

Re:Boycott Microsoft!!! Fight liberal media corrup

[Anonymous Coward]

amen brother!

What new incarnation of bizarro world are we witnessing here? - a conservative railing against the capitalist, monopolist big bidness corruption-loving cretanic evildoers in favor of commons-based bottom-up power-to-the-people open source thoughtful solutions?

Wake me up when this right-induced descent into Mr. LPS' red-room is over!

Incorrect facts

[stupidkiwi]

Here is what I had to say at Ars Technica... I stopped reading after I ran accross too many accuracy problems. The "proportionally-sized scroll bars" that were accredited to Acorns Risc OS in 1987 is incorrect as the patent was awarded years earlier to Commodore for the Amigas Workbench, which had this feature. The Task Bar which is accrdited to Windows 95 was actually in use a decade earlier by Acorns Risc OS. No mention as to the Amigas other OS inventions. Like multiple screens. Each screen held as many programs and windows as you wished, each screen could be dragged down with its contents, or pushed back in the stack of screens by clicking on the depth gadget. Each screen could have an independant resolution, and the OS would display both resolutions at the same time if two screens with different resolutions were made visible by dragging. Also since therfe was mention of single tasking and task switching, why the the Amigas OS miss out on the mention of the first consumer OS that had multitasking? Amiga users were harrassed for a decade by Mac and Windows users that "mutlitasking is useless, you can't use more than one program at a time". This is a badly researched article by someone who obviously was not there, or only ever used one OS family while ignoring the rest of the computing world.

"launch programs by clicking on icons,"

[The Cisco Kid]

I prefer to run programs from a CLI in a shell window. The only GUI application I use regularly is mozilla (started from a shell); pretty much everything I do, I do from a shell. Rather than trying to manage an entire seperate interface (or using someone else's idea of what a default should be) it seems to much simpler to do it this way.

The CLI is power, the CLI is control. If you are unable to function with a CLI, you are giving up quite a bit of both.

Re:"launch programs by clicking on icons,"

[grumbel]

CLIs are nice, the sad thing is that they have advanged even less then GUIs in the last years, almost not at all. XTerms are still basically emulating old serial terminals with all there fundamental problems (hard to get Backspace/Delete correctly over the wire, etc.) for basically little good reason. Interaction between GUI and CLI is also almost not there, you can click a link here and there and maybe do copy&paste, but thats often as far as you get. Where is my thumbnail preview on 'ls', where are more then 16 colors and when can I finally do a structured grep, not a line based one. There really hasn't been much innovation in this area, XMLTerm is one of the few, but not a much successfull one. On MacOSX is all the same, the only real progress (as in end user product) seems to come out of Microsoft with the MSH, wondering when we will see some of its features cloned over on the Unix side.

Re:"launch programs by clicking on icons,"

[The Cisco Kid]

To be honest, not a single one of the 'features' you lament for in a CLI/shell are even remotely of interest to me. My delete/backspace work fine (GnomeTerminal, fyi). My copy/paste work fine. I cant imagine why Id want 'ls' to display anything other than what it does now, certainly not any sort of thumnails (on a *text* terminal??? wtf). If I want previews of graphics I'll fire up xv. The only thing I use colors for is colorls, and its got plenty for that. And to be honest while Ive been using grep and regex's for quite a long time, Ive no idea what you mean by 'structured' grep.

Re:"launch programs by clicking on icons,"

[grumbel]

### (on a *text* terminal??? wtf)

The terminal should *not* be a text terminal, but just one which accepts textual input, since there is really no good reason to do statusbars as ascii art, when you are running on a 1280x960x32bit display. And yes, in an ideal world, the right libraries would take care that your text tools would even work on a real VT100 connected via serial console.

### Ive no idea what you mean by 'structured' grep.

A structured grep would we one that would search for real objects in a stream/tree of objects and not toy around with just plain text. For XML for example this would allow to use XPath expressions to select a specific part of the document, which is almost impossible or at least super ugly to do with a plain text based grep. Simalar it would allow to access the output of 'df' in a structured way so that I could exactly the amount of used space on a device, without the danger of getting consfused by spaces or newlines in the textual output.

Re:"launch programs by clicking on icons,"

[The Cisco Kid]

I'm perfectly content with my shell/CLI being a *text* terminal. I can't imagine any reason I would desire it to be GUI - this would defeat the entire point, to me.

And given your concern about 'being confused by spaces and newlines' (in df output), I'm not really sure where this confusion would come from. df's output is pretty well defined. As far as what you want to do with grep, that doesnt sound even remotely appropriate for 'grep' - perhaps you need to be writing your own app.

Sun's NeWS?

[Anonymous Coward]

No mention of it anywhere? It was around on a bunch of 68020 based Suns at my univ. If memory serves, it used some sort of display postscript scheme.

Needs more X-Windows Discussion

[SirBruce]

X has changed a lot from the early versions to the modern ones, and there have been numerous Window managers and operating environments over the years. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of that.

Also, what about Sun's aborted alternative, Sunview?

A discussion of some of the Windows alternative GUIs (Dashboard, etc.) would also have been interesting.

Bruce

Re:Needs more X-Windows Discussion

[jgrahn]

X has changed a lot from the early versions to the modern ones, and there have been numerous Window managers and operating environments over the years. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of that

They could have added a screenshot of a default X11 desktop, with twm, xbiff and xterm, at least.

Also, what about Sun's aborted alternative, Sunview?

Yeah, only it wasn't all that abortive. I was still using it in 1990/91; the Sun graphical workstations had been around for many years by then, and our site still regarded X as an experimental add-on.

Also, I disagree with "[Open Look, Motif and other X-based GUIs] were simple GUIs that attempted to mimic the appearance of Microsoft Windows...". They were complex and powerful, not simple. And I don't think their designers took Windows 2.0 or 3.0 seriously -- there were many GUIs around at the time if you wanted fresh ideas, and Windows was never one of the more impressive ones.

Re:Needs more X-Windows Discussion

[buckminsterinsd]

Yeah, he's skipped over a ton of window-centric systems...

He completetly left out the first commercially successful workstation. Apollo Domain from around in 1979 if my old fart memory manager isn't totally hosed. despite being built with M680X0 hardware, these puppies were way fast for their time. That single level memory storage model made location of your data tranparent across the LAN. Very cool.

As I can best recall we had a sun2-160 with Suntools, later on SunView in 1982 or 1983. Yeah, they were slower than shit until the Sun3/260 came out. That $80K workstation was way faster than our VAVen except the 8650 which cost $800K!

And SGI had their M680x0 hardware out that ran their proprietary windowing package.

We had a bunch of MicroVaxII's running as a VMScluster with some kinda B/W head on them in 1985 or 86.

I was managing the graphics programmers for a little company called ECAD when the color heads for the DECstation were made available. I started my guys migrating from our platform specific "bare glass" graphics libraries to this new-fangled X-windows 10.R4 around then. I think we may of shipped one of the first commecial software packages to run under X-windows. Around 1986.

And Sun's NeWS totally rocked except it came out way after X-windows was really entrenched.

And the Motif window manager was out long before MS Windows Program Manager was released. The MS window dudes copied it's form and function, not the otherway around.

So I agree the X-windows stuff got shortsheeted.

Amiga Icons

[kjots]

The article only briefly touches on the Amiga computer, and makes no mention of it's icons at all!

Amiga icons were implemented completely differently from any GUI I've encountered since. First of all, instead of being embedded into an executable a la Windows (and Mac?), or using a shared image file like in your standard *nix GUI, each file could have a '.info' file (i.e. if a file was called "Shell", it's .info file would be a file called "Shell.info" in the same directory) which contained, along with some other settings, an icon for the file in the Amiga Workbench. Early Amigas (i.e. before OS2.0) could only show files with a .info file. Later versions could show all files, using a generic image for the files with no icons of their own. Note that this only applied to the Workbench; all files (and their .info files) could be viewed using command line tools.

The icons themselves were simply a 2-bit (i.e. 4 colour) plane-interleaved paletted bitmap. The colours were not stored with the icon, but were determined by the preference settings of the Workbench. Thus, all icons on a particular desktop shared the same colours, and if you changed the workbench colours, all the icons (and text, and windows, etc) would change too. An icon could change in one of three different ways when selected. First, all the colours are inverted; that is the first colour is swapped with the fourth and the second is swapped with the third. The second is the same as the first except the background of the icon appears to be 'flood-filled' back to its original colour, so only the picture within the icon itself is inverted (this allows apparently non-rectangular icons to be selected without revealing their true rectangular nature). The third (and this is one of the features that defined the Amiga GUI for me) is a completely separate image can be substituted. Thus, a .info file can contain two icons, one regular and one selected view. Additionally, an Amiga icon was not limited by size; it could be as small or as large as you liked (this is the other feature). Think of a giant black silhouette of a castle that erupts into orange flame when selected. That could be an Amiga icon (and it was, IIRC)!

The .info files also indicated to the Workbench what type of file it was dealing with. A DISK .info file represented the icon of the drive upon which the .info file was stored, provided the .info file was called "Disk.info" and resided in the root directory of the drive (this implies that it is impossible to have an icon for a file named "Disk" in the root directory of any drive). DRAW .info files represented drawers (directories), a TOOL was an executables, a PROJECT was a data file and GARBAGE was the trashcan. The Workbench would use the .info file to determine what to do with the file; DRAW files could opened to reveal more files, TOOL files could be launched, etc. Changing the file type would change the way the Workbench interacted with the file, including attempting to browse a regular file as a directory, or execute a data file. Naturally, these attempts would fail, and in some cases the Workbench would ignore the .info file if it did not correlate to the file it represented.

Another interesting feature is the way TOOL files were launched. The .info file included parameters for the executable, since programs launched from the Workbench did not receive their parameters via the 'argv' variable, but rather as 'message' from the underlying operating system. But that's a discussion for another time...

I'm sure there's a tonne of info about the Amiga on the web. Go find it yourself if your interested.

Re:Amiga Icons

[stupidkiwi]

I thought about adding the facts about the icons, but I figured that I had confused the Mac and Windows users enough.
The reality is that of all the systems that were listed the Amiga had the leas space in the article, but had more innovations than any OS in the article. None were mentioned tough, and only the first gen of the OS was covered, when there were some serious improvements over WB 1.3, WB 2.04, WB 3... and no mantion that the users (read fanatics) have improved it further still and there is even a new OS waiting in the wings that is loosly based on WorkBench.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga also had this:

http://www.sasg.com/mui/

Which was ahead of anything before or since, I think.

Re:Amiga Icons

[xombo]

One extention: .pif
I'm pretty sure it not only allowed you to specify memory limitations, but icon-preferences as well in Windows 3.11. Frankly, eliminating the cumbersome hassle of managing two files as a singular unit and replacing it with embedded or otherwise OS-managed databases (Registry, et all) is far more practical and less headache causing for users in the long run.

Re:Amiga Icons

[McNihil]

>replacing it with embedded
>or otherwise OS-managed databases
Yeah really the Windows registry is sooo much better. While I am not extatic over .info files they are much better in some senses... .info files were early days mimetypes... Also having it specificaly in a file by it's own one can always change the behaviour on a file by file basis. OS-X is similar in this regard where they splice up the applications in directories and have File browser know where to look for stuff. A generic evolution of the .info file. Also it was never a hassle to manage the two files on Amiga... using the GUI it acted as one file in any case.

A lot of people confuse a products "sellability" with how good the system is and wrongly assume that if it didn't sell it must have been utter crap. I feel sorry for many people that didn't have the pleasure to use an Amiga, and I know for a fact that people would have been a whole lot harsher on Windows way of doing things if they had.
Here's a tost to Amiga, BeBox, Atari ST, Sinclair QL and Acorn Archimedes.
Windows put us back 20 years thats all what I am saying.

LISP GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

Lisp has also done some impressive work as well. Computing so far behind, it isn't funny.

Another Resource for More Info

[GQUEUE]

If you can find it, Alan Kay did a great video about the User Interface called "Doing with Images Makes Symbols". He goes over a lot of the stuff in the article and provides some background into the thinking behind their work at Xerox. http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2

The real first GUIs

[Animats]

The first "intelligent graphical user interface" was probably General Railway Signal's NX system, in 1937. Interlocking systems, which prevented setting signals and switches in incorrect ways, predated NX, but NX was the first system that went beyond interlocking to actually helping the user do things. The dispatcher selected a train, and NX would light up all the potential routes the train could take, taking into account all conflicts. The dispatcher could then select a route, and NX would set and lock all the switches and signals for that route, releasing the resources as the train passed. This was the birth of "user-friendly" systems.

The first computerized system with a GUI was SAGE, the air defense system. This had CRTs and pointing devices in 1958. The pointing device was a light gun, and it really looked like a gun. This was appropriate, because, in the appropriate modes, pulling the trigger on the light gun could launch a surface to air missile.

There were a number of graphical CAD systems well before the PARC effort. Sutherland's Sketchpad, in 1963, was the first prototype. The General Motors DAC-1, in 1964, was the first commercial one.

The PLATO system, a very early computer-based instruction system, was demoed in 1960, but, like most of the other systems of that era, tied up a whole mainframe for one user. Plato was gradually scaled up - by 1967, there were special plasma flat panel displays (red only) and time-shared access.

So by the early 1970s, there were quite a few GUI projects that worked. They just cost too much.

Getting the cost down took a while. The early minicomputer-based workstations like the Alto were in the $25-50K range. The UNIX workstations of the early 1980s (Sun, Apollo, PERQ) were in that price range. The original Apple Lisa, a good but expensive machine, cost $10K. The original cost-reduced Macintosh was around $2500, and, lacking a hard drive, it really wasn't very useful. Not until the Macintosh was built up to a reasonable hardware level (512K and a hard drive) could you really get any work done with it.

By then, in the late 1980s, the hardware was finally ready. You could get a megabyte of memory, a bit-mapped display, a reasonable CPU, and a hard drive in a desktop box for under $3K. At which point Microsoft moved into the field.

Re:The real first GUIs

[kjots]

The first computerized system with a GUI was SAGE, the air defense system. This had CRTs and pointing devices in 1958. The pointing device was a light gun, and it really looked like a gun. This was appropriate, because, in the appropriate modes, pulling the trigger on the light gun could launch a surface to air missile.

Thanks, I'll have one of those.

Re:The real first GUIs

[Cmdr TECO]

"Left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for -- when this was brought up -- we asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one."

-- submariner describing missile launches, BBC, 20 July 2003

For those who don't want to RTFA

[dantheman82]

I skimmed the 8-page article. Basically, the gist is that all the major pieces were in place for innovation very early on thanks to some early visionaries. Xerox created a great environment where substantial GUI innovation took place. After Smalltalk (amazing in it's own right), Apple's Lisa included former Xerox and other developments and innovated quite a bit. Shortly thereafter Apple's NeXTstep, other competitors like Microsoft (Windows 1.0) added their smaller enhancements. Windows 95 has been credited for the Task Manager GUI and Start Menu (very integral to future Windows versions). OS X had a few minor enhancements, especially Expose. It seemed to the author that everyone's settling toward the "sweet spot" of user experience in 2D, and 3D seems unlikely. I'd personally say...anything is possible - if Avalon's push toward 3D development flops, then Longhorn could be dead in the water for the average user.

Regions...the core of a fast GUI

[mveloso]

One incredibly important tidbit is buried in the article: regions.

"One critical advance from the Lisa team came from an Apple engineer who was not a former PARC employee, but had seen the demonstration of Smalltalk. He thought he had witnessed the Alto's ability to redraw portions of obscured windows when a topmost window was moved: this was called "regions". In fact, the Alto did not have this ability, but merely redrew the entire window when the user selected it. Despite the difficulty of this task, regions were implemented in the Lisa architecture and remain in GUIs to this day."

That man was Bill Atkinson, and he came up with region drawing code that Apple patented. It's the reason that Apple's GUI was brutally faster than any other GUI out there. What was great about it was that it not only did rectangular regions, it was able to handle arbitrarily complex regions.

It's worth it to go over the patent, if you get the chance. It just goes to show that a misunderstanding can have incredibly positive repurcussions.

I wasn't implying

[unassimilatible]

that Apple first got the GUI idea from PARC, just that it paid well for what it did get from Xerox.

Thanks for the clarification...

How about QNX?

[stupidkiwi]

I did not see any mention of QNX. Being the first realtime OS, its GUI had one interesting feature. It was the first OS that allowed the extention of the desktop accross two monitors. Windows could be dragged to be displayed in part on both monitors, even while playing a first person shooter in the window.

There still is a thing called IP

[unassimilatible]

people really have to get off the rediculous bandwagon that copying is bad.

There are a few of us who read /. for the articles (you know, as with Playboy), but don't buy into the whole "IP is bad" thing. The US Constitution is clear on mandating Congress to pass laws to protect art and science:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Some of us still believe in reasonable IP law, which does not preclude reform...

Hey, I've got one of those!

[AndroidCat]

When I looked at this picture of the NLS, I recognized it immediately. Mine's almost the same, probably a later version. I can't figure out why they used such a big display however.

Re:Obsolete? Not keeping up with trends.

[cahiha]

But the NeXT foundation and Objective-C together are actually very pertient to the world we live in today. [...] Objective-C is actually where the industry should have gone instead of C++.

Objective-C is indeed better for GUI and application programming than C++. It would have been great if people had adopted it in the 1980's, because it might have allowed C programmers to find out about, and transition to, better approaches to programming. But even in the 1980's, Objective-C was not state of the art; it was an uncomfortable and not particularly well-conceived compromise between C programming and OOP. Today, it offers little that Java or C# don't offer in a better, more convenient way.

It's easier to learn and use than C++ (I've done both) and might be a little behind Java or C#, but then again it's also not really been overhauled for a while.

I think that's an understatement: Objective-C hasn't changed significantly in 20 years.

The rapid degree of progress Apple has managed to make in the OS and with other programs is a good demonstrator for how efficient Objective-C can be.

I don't believe that's true. The thing that makes Macintosh so attractive to many people is its apparent simplicity, and that is achieved by keeping the user interface simple. So, the progress on Macintosh is due to careful design, not due to heroic programming efforts.

If you give, say, the iTunes design to a Cocoa programmer and a programmer using, say, Java/Eclipse or VisualBasic programmer, you'll probably find that the Cocoa programmer will take longer to implement it.

Another PARC interface...

[cr0sh]

Something else PARC invented, but which has yet to make a full impact on today's systems, was a concept they called "Tabs, Pads, and Boards".

Essentially, "Tabs" were little name tag like devices a user could wear, and via RF signals, other devices near the user could know when and where a user was within the environment, and change/react accordingly. Simple things like finding out where a person in an organization was, as well as turning lights on and off, was one use. More complex tasks, like phones having special ring tones and ringing that phone near the user in his ringtone, as well as computer systems the user sat down in front of becoming active with the user's last state (from the last machine he was at?) were also ideas bandied about.

Pads were essentially the same thing as today's PDAs - wireless input/output devices linked to the network via RF links, which could share information with other users. Thus, a scribble could be made and saved, or "beamed" to another user(s), perhaps in a business meeting or such.

Finally, boards were something like an "electronic whiteboard" - where a user could draw on the board (actually a large screen display with a light pen) and save the data - or beam it to other user's Pads - or recieve scribbles from others Pads...

Ultimately, the idea was a ubiquitous and pervasive, network aware computer-aided collaboration system for (mainly) office use - possibly with the goal of eliminating paper from the office. With everybody having a Tab, a Pad, and access to Boards - collaboration and meetings could become real idea brainstorm and learning sessions. All data generated during the meeting, as well as viewed during the meeting, would be electronic, so the idea was that nothing would be lost, misinterpreted, mistyped, or any number of other things that could occur...

Today, do we have any of this technology? The obvious answer is that we have all of the technology available, for a price: Tabs are simply RFID tags of a sort (and one could even add a real LCD or OLED display to have them show messages as well), Pads are today's wireless PDAs and cellphones, and Boards exist today as (albeit expensive) electronic whiteboards. All the wireless networking system exist as well, we also have IP phones and such...

Basically, we have everything available, except for an integrated software solution to tie everything together so that it operates as a cohesive whole - as well as a price point that makes it affordable for regular businesses to make them switch to it over what is currently done (standard whiteboards, flipcharts, maybe a projector and powerpoint).

I would be so grateful to have PARCs vision be the norm - the savings in time and hair pulling alone from losing information (either purposefully or accidentally) from regular whiteboards, to having it all be electronic, would be worth it...

TFA only a history of windowing systems.

[mikelin.ca]

Ok, so we have a history of GUIs for windowing systems. It's a shame because there is just much more GUI out there. I'd like to see more on modern GUI than highlighting the start menu, and double buffered windows.
I want to learn about tk, QT, java GUI, .net, MFC, the webapp, the thinclient, up to the modern day.
The benefit being so much more use of the word GUI!

Regions...the core of a software patent.

[Anonymous Coward]

"That man was Bill Atkinson, and he came up with region drawing code that Apple patented. It's the reason that Apple's GUI was brutally faster than any other GUI out there. What was great about it was that it not only did rectangular regions, it was able to handle arbitrarily complex regions."

But, but! We hate software patents!

People who still don't "get" GUIs

[Zobeid]

More than 20 years after the introduction of Macintosh, there are still a lot of people who don't seem to "get" the GUI concept. I suspect a lot of them are Linux programmers.

My first exposure to a GUI was when I got my Atari 520ST in 1985. I approached it with skepticism, it was a newfangled-looking thing at the time, but I soon became a true believer. The ST didn't have any command line -- everything you did on it, you did using a GUI. That applied right down to application programming, which was done using a GUI-WIMP based text editor, IDE, and visual GUI editor (i.e. resource editor). Likewise, every third-party utility, no matter how technical in nature, came with a GUI interface. They had to, because that was the only way to do it.

And you know what I found out? The Atari ST, despite its limitations, was an easy computer to use -- and an easy computer to program.

It's remarkable today to observe how many programming environments *still* don't come with features like an IDE or visual GUI interface creator, and to ponder the reasons why not.

Example: Python is hot. . . I'm sure it's OK for simple scripting, but why are people getting so excited about a language that doesn't even come with a good WIMP-based IDE and visual GUI creator? Are we really expected to create applications with this?

The problem as I see it, as that a lot of programmers from the Unix tradition still view "user friendly" computers with contempt. To them, user-friendly means idiot-friendly, and a GUI exists only so that Grandma can launch her web browser without getting confused. They don't program their Unix/Linux boxes using a GUI environment, and it would never occur to them that they should.

And here's the revelation. . . The GUI wasn't invented for Grandma. It was invented for everybody: office workers, scientists, artists, publishers, musicians, network administrators . . . and yes, programmers. The purpose is to make complicated things easy, not simple things.

I find one of the most frustrating aspects of Mac OS X is the occasional need to work with utilities from the Unix world (Subversion being a recent example). As long as I stick with Apple-supplied software, everything is easy and natural. As soon as I need to install and configure any program from the Unix/Linux world, and I'm forced to dig "under the hood" of Mac OS X, everything quickly goes to Hell. Sure, I can make it work eventually -- after enough tinkering and fiddling and digging around for documentation -- but I find myself asking why. Why should I have to put up with this nonsense in the year 2005?

The problem goes beyond the lack of GUI interfaces for programs coming from the Unix and Linux world. There's also the poor quality and inconsistency of those programs that have a GUI. These are interfaces designed by somebody who doesn't want to use a GUI himself. They're tacked on as an afterthought because "the dumb users" want a GUI, not because the program's designer wants or appreciates a GUI. And can you blame them? The only kind of GUIs they have regular experience with are the desperately *bad* and confusing ones typical of Unix and Linux applications.

Re:People who still don't "get" GUIs

[TeknoHog]

Example: Python is hot. . . I'm sure it's OK for simple scripting, but why are people getting so excited about a language that doesn't even come with a good WIMP-based IDE and visual GUI creator? Are we really expected to create applications with this?

Python follows the paradigm that programs are written as text files, like C, Java and so on. It is meant to make this kind of programming easier and more efficient, because it seems we'll be programming this way for quite some time.

Python focuses on making the text-based syntax better than its competitors. This advantage is lost if we start programming with graphical tools instead of text files. If we get to that point, I'm sure Python will not be quite so hot any more.

Re:People who still don't "get" GUIs

[Zobeid]

". . .it seems we'll be programming this way for quite some time."

Speak for yourself.

I started using an IDE and visual tools twenty years ago, and it was a huge improvement over what came before. My question is why everybody else hasn't jumped on board.

If you think that programming with a basic text editor, a command line, and programmatic creation of interfaces is better. . . if you think it's easier. . . if you think it's faster, or more efficient. . . It's because you've never used a good GUI-oriented development environment. Simple as that.

I have special scorn for any dev kit that expects me to create a graphical interface programmatically, using ASCII text. That's just dumb, isn't it?

Have you used the tools?

[SuperKendall]

If you give, say, the iTunes design to a Cocoa programmer and a programmer using, say, Java/Eclipse or VisualBasic programmer, you'll probably find that the Cocoa programmer will take longer to implement it.

Actually, having used the tools for all those languages I do not think that's an accurate statement. I've built a lot of Java GUI apps. just a few visual studio ones, and only done a bit of XCode so far - but I really feel like once up to speed XCode is probably the best GUI design app around. Again the message passing nature of the language underneath really helps since you're basically building a stub GUI that you then flesh out the code behind.

The thing that makes Apple apps really good is because they don't have to go to heroics to design nice interfaces, the tools lend themselves to easy and rapid GUI refinement.

Re:Have you used the tools?

[cahiha]

but I really feel like once up to speed XCode is probably the best GUI design app around

I did look at XCode to see whether there were any good ideas one could copy; I didn't find much. Eclipse, VB, and XCode each have their problems, but Eclipse seems better for experienced programmers and VB seems better for novices, and commercial Smalltalk environments still beat them all.

I think the future is declarative GUI design (usually, XML GUI specifications these days) combined with high-level languages. Linux and Windows are far ahead of Macintosh there technologically and in terms of tools.

Again the message passing nature of the language underneath really helps since you're basically building a stub GUI that you then flesh out the code behind.

And how do you think Objective-C is "message passing" in a way that Java, C#, Smalltalk, or Python are not? Those "message passing patterns" Apple talks about are standard OOP techniques and designs, techniques and designs which Apple (via NeXT) incidentally also copied from Xerox PARC.

Re:Have you used the tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java and C# are *not* message-passing architectures. Smalltalk and Obj-C are. I can't speak for Python.

In a message-passing architecture, when a method call is made, the specifics of the method call (type, number of arguments, method name, etc.) aren't checked until at the very last second: when the receiver receives the method call at runtime. Only then is it determined which method to use. If no such method exists, and there's no alternative handler for unknown messages, the sytem will issue a runtime exception.

This ultra-dynamically-bound method-call approach is what enables magic like Interface Builder, a sheer work of beauty designed by Jean-Marie Hullot originally in Lisp and then ported to Objective-C by NeXT. I'm no fan of XCode (I think it's an absolute disaster of a bad interface), but I have yet to see Interface Builder's equal.

Message-Passing also enables Objective C's Portable Distributed Objects (PDO), the most elegant distributed objects mechanism I've ever seen. In Objective C, when a method call results in a message sent to an object which has no idea what to do with it, the message is wrapped up and resent to a special method called forward: . By overriding forward: an object can manage its own last-ditch handling of wacky incoming messages before the system croaks out with an error. Hmmm, can't seem to do that in Java or C#! Why would you want such a beast? Because in PDO, processes could issue calls on each others' objects by receiving 'proxy' objects which looked and smelled like the other processes' object, even if it was located in another country. The proxies looked and smelled the same because they implemented NO methods at all -- except for forward:! When an incoming message, it'd get rerouted to forward:, which would in turn ship it over the net to call the remote object. Neither application would need to know that one was talking to the objects of the other. A work of beauty.

No, you can't assemble something even REMOTELY as pretty in Python, Java, or C#.

Re:Have you used the tools?

[cahiha]

This ultra-dynamically-bound method-call approach is what enables magic like Interface Builder, [...] No, you can't assemble something even REMOTELY as pretty in Python, Java, or C#.

Dynamic method forwarding is quite convenient, and many dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Python, CLOS, Ruby, Dylan, ...) support it. Perhaps suprisingly, even though Java and C# are statically typed OOLs, they also support it well because their reflection capabilities are so powerful (e.g., Javassist).

Objective-C copied the feature from Smalltalk, but it lacks the reflection capabilities to support it properly. Unfortunately, that's the whole story of Objective-C: it copied ideas from dynamic languages but doesn't implement them correctly.

Re:Have you used the tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that many dynamic languages have handle dynamic message forwarding. It's *not* true that in those languages objects can necessarily handle messages sent to them for which they don't already have a declared method. Objective-C is unusual in this regard in its usage of the forward: method. Such things can be whipped up in other languages, but to my knowledge neither Ruby nor Python can do this magic. Neither can my pet dynamic language (NewtonScript). They're stuck. The Lisp-derived languages (CLTLII/CLOS, Dylan, Smalltalk, etc.) may or may not be able to do it depending on language.

As to reflection: this isn't the same. Being able to determine what methods an object can receive is *not* the same as being able to just throw methods at objects, without knowing their class first or even bothering to construct a type signature. Reflection allows you to crack into the system at a low level; it doesn't provide access to such features at the ordinary-use level. Language-level features, not low-level ones, is what makes message-passing useful. And it's what makes distributed objects crap in Java and C# so ugly compared to PDO.

As to reflection capabilities: Objective-C provides complete access to its low-level structures, methods, and message forwarding procedure, all the way down to the C structs and functions which perform the operations. That's an *awful* lot lower-level than you can do in Smalltalk.

I have my gripes about Objective-C (no garbage collection; the security disaster that is Categories; lack of clean, language-level access to object data; built on an unsafe language (C) ). But it's got _lots_ of reflection capabilities. Claiming lack of reflection capabilities marks you as an Objc newbie.

Re:Have you used the tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's *not* true that in those languages objects can necessarily handle messages sent to them for which they don't already have a declared method.

I didn't say "necessarily", I gave a list of dynamic languages that could.

Objective-C is unusual in this regard in its usage of the forward: method.

The things that Objective-C is "unusual" for among dynamic languages is its disregard for runtime safety, its incomplete reflection capability, and its lack of garbage collection, all serious problems. And those alone are reasons enough to scrap the language. I can't think of a single positive contribution that Objective-C has made.

Such things can be whipped up in other languages, but to my knowledge neither Ruby nor Python can do this magic.

Of course, they can. And unlike Objective-C, it's type safe.

As to reflection: this isn't the same. Being able to determine what methods an object can receive is *not* the same as being able to just throw methods at objects

Reflection in general is indeed not the same, but Java and C# style reflection is powerful enough so that it gives you these capabilities. That's why I pointed to Javassist, a library that uses Java reflection capabilities to let you do the equivalent of forward:. Go read the links.

As to reflection capabilities: Objective-C provides complete access to its low-level structures, methods, and message forwarding procedure, all the way down to the C structs and functions which perform the operations. That's an *awful* lot lower-level than you can do in Smalltalk.

The problem is that Objective-C does not give you full type information. For example, you can't tell what the argument types for the method call are, and you can't even reliably tell whether something pointed to by a pointer is actually of the right type (or is even an object).

But it's got _lots_ of reflection capabilities. Claiming lack of reflection capabilities marks you as an Objc newbie.

Objective-C has plenty of reflection capabilities; unfortunately, they are not sufficiently complete to permit software to be type safe. Since you think they are, obviously, you are the Objective-C newbie; if you say that you have used it for many years, all the worse: you haven't been paying attention.

Multipule Desktops in Windows

[jojo tdfb]

Actualy, you can do multipul desktops on windows.
the first time I saw it was in a program called litestep (if that isn't up there's an older version here).
Not only did it do multipule desktops it also skins them too. There's tons of other shell replacements like it at shell city. Some are better than others thou.....

Turns out ripping out the shell in windows isn't that hard.

These days I just use the normal shell and some random tool that came with my nvidia card that let's you have multipule desktops. Handy when some game blows up your refresh rate (civ 3).

Old news from OSNews

[pdamoc]

I knew Slashdot borrowed news from OSNews but... usually they did it the same day....
This one is like 4 days old:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10512

Invaders.run / Galaxian.run ??!?!??!

[torpor]

hey, the Alto had invaders and Galaxian? Anyone know what these looked like .. i'd love to find out ..

off to find an Alto emulator, if there is one..

Now ...

[Udo Schmitz]

... if this doesn't show why software patents are bad I don't know what does. Imagine Aplle had patented the double click or the pull down menu. How would the computer interfaces of today look? Or would Apple just be the Microsoft of that alternate reality?

Re:Now ...

[xombo]

The real question is whether or not we would be worse off in that alternate universe. It seems to me that we would be in a greater position than we are now with regards to uniformity among application interfaces (this means you OSs). Apple's dedication to a standardized user-interface is what made them so popular to begin with. Each application follows a pre-fabricated set of rules and regulations that serve a dual purpose:
1) increased efficiency in complex, non-repetative tasks that manuals may not cover
2) lower learning curve aided by similar interface designs across applications

well

[Udo Schmitz]

yeah, newsflash yourself, this is the best and most in depth GUI history there is till today. I think it should be a perm link on /., so that we can just point the trolls there ...

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

Big deal - anyone can do a "review" of what has already been done.

Nope

[Udo Schmitz]

How about, "Apple bought some ideas from Xerox for millions in cash and stock?"

How about: "You'd still be wrong"?

There was no cash involved, only bargain Apple stock options for Xerox (it was already clear how big a success Apples IPO would be).

And what Steve and his engineers saw at Xerox was nothing more than this:

http://media.arstechnica.com/images/gui/7-AltoST.j pg

They still put a lot of their own work in the GUI. Well, that and hired ex-Xerox employees of course.

Never again

[dutchd00d]

From TFA:

Saying that "Apple invented the GUI" or "Apple ripped off the idea from PARC" is overly simplistic, but saying that "Xerox invented the GUI" is equally so. In fact each team borrowed liberally from all GUIs that had been created in the past, added their own unique contributions, and paved the way for other teams to move forward in the future.

Thank god that won't happen anymore, now that we have software patents.

Peculiar sense of history

[ebcdic]

What is the world coming to when garbage collection can be described as a "modern, Java-like feature"?

Why 3D?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually tried the concept, or thought it out? How easy will it be to manipulate objects in 3D compared to 2D? Most people will prefer the simplicty and higher resolution in 2D.

You really need a "killer app" for 3D, and the only one I can think of is 3D VR. Even that has been on the market many years now, but really never took off. I think it just makes you too far cut off from reality.. It's too much strain to switch between realities, than between our world and a 2D paper or computer screen.

Just think of the mousearms of the future if you have to manipulate a 3D mouse ;*)

The applications for this is very limited, so it is hard to market something like this. At least with current technology and concepts.

Personally, I will ALWAYS prefer to do work in 2D, unless the WORK demands it, ie: medical scans or making levels for Quake or something. Even then, I don't really need to fool my brain to make it stereo 3D. After a while I will get immersed in it enough, and it's easier to switch between work and outside.

This just sounds like technology for technologys sake, not for humans.

Interesting? Why is it in the DEVELOPER section??

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone can report on things that others have already done. This is no break through to do. I am not impressed. Reimer doesn't even have a degree in this section of the field, nor does he even know how to program!

Re:Cool = UNCOOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this in the developer section?

Anyone can report on things that others have already done.

This is no break through to do.

I am not impressed.

Above all, Reimer doesn't even have a degree in this section of the field, nor does he even know how to program!

He's just a nobody, trying to be a somebody, by attaching to the coat tails of others work "reporting on it".

Another Jeremy Reimer rehash, nothing original or creative.

Ditto for lisp machines

[alispguru]

A good summary of the two main branches of lisp machine history is here. I personally first saw both a PERQ and a CADR at IJCAI 81.

I read this article, and...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Jeremy Reimer was STILL a fuckwit.

http://www.aquarionics.com/fun/bestofusenet/fuckwi t.html

X?! X! I cannot recall all the names...

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

It is certainly told from an exclusively personal computing
perspective. There was a lot of activity in the workstation
market at the time, and most of those companies were in
the valley, and were likely talking to each other. It only has a screenshot of kde, completely misses all
the innovations of X (aside from mentioning separation
of mechanism from policy, which is very important.)

• network transparency, nobody touches X for that even today. http://www.x.org/X11_protocol.html
  
• device independence. You could fire off GUI applications from a sun workstation on an SGI or an HP, and the window would show up.... http://www.x.org/X11_xdesign.html
  
• X-Terminals do not exist in the PC world. They were a cost effective technology to bring bigger displays and simpler management of workstations in the 90's.
  
• The use of window managers and GUI toolkits meant
  that there was a playing field to implement all sorts of GUIs and there were.
  
  • Motif toolkit + mwm
    
  • twm as a non-proprietary simple sample window manager.
    
  • Sun! their original toolkits, with GUI APIs, bitmapped displays, and windows. (what was it called?)
    
  • SGI (first display postscript driven windowing system.) I cannot recall the name...
    
  • Apollo (only seen it on one station for a year or two, was quite different.)
    
  • HP had their own motif fork...
    
  • Sun NeWS.
    
  • HP & Dec converged stuff to create... OSF/Motif.
    
  • CDE came out...
    
  
  

and much more... You could see what PC OS's should do
back in the early 90's but what the PC's didn't because the
hardware of the time wasn't upto it.

Lies!

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore invented the GUI.

Wrongfully claims Smalltalk first OO language

[dubidub]

The article, on page 3, states that Smalltalk was the world's first object-oriented programming language. However, Wikipedia says that it is based on Simula. The Simula article on Wikipedia says: "Simula introduced the object-oriented programming paradigm and thus can be considered the first object-oriented programming language and a predecessor to Smalltalk, C++, Java, and all modern class-based object-oriented languages."

I read this article, and...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Jeremy Reimer was STILL a fuckwit.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.humor.best -of-usenet/browse_thread/thread/48529bed53b9761c/b 9d53efbb797a44b?q=jeremy+Canadian+fuckwit+Beard&rn um=1&hl=en#b9d53efbb797a44b

a bit light on the X-Windows side...

[dahlek]

I was hoping for better coverage of X-Windows. I think that UNIX based GUIs had some pretty damned good ideas of their own - or, were they their own - the article didn't say.

Multiple desktops is the single most useful feature for me. I use it religiously, and can't stand the constant shrinking and moving required in Windows as a result - I love to have certain apps open full screen 100% of the time - like my browser. When I want desktop space, I switch desktops. The news-ticker and taskbar remains constant across each desktop and I LOVE that.

It also might have mentioned more about the networkable nature of X - this is a feature I use all the time too - running remote apps. A quick mention of desQview and its plans to use the X system might have worked too...

Finally, more attention to GEOS would have been nice - maybe I'm wrong, but it was my understanding that windows 3.0 did not have true-type fonts, but GEOS did. Further, GEOS could multitask its own apps better than windows of that time - in other words, GEOS really was, for a short time, a better product - the best GUI for the pc at the time - and written with what GEOS was famous for - lean and clean, no bloat, code.

Resource bundles perchance?

[SuperKendall]

I think the future is declarative GUI design (usually, XML GUI specifications these days) combined with high-level languages. Linux and Windows are far ahead of Macintosh there technologically and in terms of tools.

Oh, XAML. Yes very interesting - I was doing that about seven years ago by hand in Java with apps that created menus and GUI forms in that manner (back then it was more properties than XML, then I started in on XML/XSLT HTML rendering systems). It's pretty nice, which is actually why I'm so fond of XCode.

You see, declaritive design by hand is fun but only goes so far - eventually it's useful to have a GUI over it. And essentially XCode is that GUI over resource bundles, which are dynamically telling the application how to build GUI's and so on. That's why it's so easy to go into Cocoa apps and play around with reasources to cheange how the app appears.

And as the other poster pointed out, message passing as a first-class feature of the Objectsive C language is literally NOTHING like what Java or C# has to offer. I would go so far as to say that message passing along with declaritive GUI design is the future. I just happen to be able to code with it now, with a slightly more primitive version of the language that will actually bring it all together (I aminge either Java or C# will drift that way eventually, currently they are racing neck in neck in a straight line with blinders on.).

Re:Resource bundles perchance?

[cahiha]

Oh, XAML. Yes very interesting - I was doing that about seven years ago by hand in Java

XAML is just one of many such approaches. Mozilla and Gnome have been based on XML GUI declarations for years. Gnome has GUI designers for that. Before that, there have been dozens of other languages, going back nearly two decades.

You see, declaritive design by hand is fun but only goes so far - eventually it's useful to have a GUI over it. And essentially XCode is that GUI over resource bundles,

Yes, just not a very good one, not even by historical standards.

And as the other poster pointed out, message passing as a first-class feature of the Objectsive C language is literally NOTHING like what Java or C# has to offer.

Well, and that's a good thing because Objective-C's support is incomplete and unsafe. Java and C#'s support is complete and safe. Unlike Objective-C, Java and C# also support persistence, inspection, remoting, and a host of other advanced features safely and completely.

Incidentally, the traditional way of doing message passing is to define an explicit data type and pass it around:

receiver.send(new MyEvent(a,b,c));

The traditional way documents the intent better, supports better type checking, and works in many different languages. Having the language automatically turn method calls into data structures is a gimmick.

Support it well?

[SuperKendall]

Dynamic method forwarding is quite convenient, and many dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Python, CLOS, Ruby, Dylan, ...) support it. Perhaps suprisingly, even though Java and C# are statically typed OOLs, they also support it well because their reflection capabilities are so powerful (e.g., Javassist [titech.ac.jp]).

I like reflection more than most people. but really lets be honest and admit those parts of Java or C# are not all that approachable to most people. How many people really use JavaAssist? Not to mention that while the capabilties are pretty good, the semantics for using them are not that easy and so do not gte used very often.

I've written a lot of Java code that dynamically loads classes or accesses methods or even uses dymanic proxies out the wazoo. Again another reason to approeciate the practicality Objective-C birngs to the table in this regard - who cares where it stole the idea from if it works?

Re:Support it well?

[cahiha]

I like reflection more than most people. but really lets be honest and admit those parts of Java or C# are not all that approachable to most people.

Neither is Objective-C reflection, really: you have to deal with C pointers, pointer casts, and type descriptors. To make it truly usable, you have to use libraries.

Actually, lots of people use those capabilities, through Beanshell or Jython, for example. That's why people like to combine scripting with low-level programming. And unlike Objective-C, this stuff works correctly, safely, and completely in Java and C#.

Again another reason to approeciate the practicality Objective-C birngs to the table in this regard - who cares where it stole the idea from if it works?

I didn't say they "stole" it, I said they "copied" it; reuse of language features is perfectly legitimate. On the other hand, one should also remember that a lot of the functionality Apple touts as "innovative" actually wasn't developed by Apple and is decades old; it comes from Stepstone and Smalltalk, among others.

The problem with reflection in Objective-C is that it just doesn't work correctly: reflection is incomplete and method calls are not type checked even at runtime. In Java, you can write a DO system that works correctly no matter what objects you throw at it. In Objective-C, you can't.

Stealing is not bad

[SuperKendall]

I use "stealing" in the best sense, I meant no negativity by it. As you say reuse of langauge features is fine and is used in many places. Nor am I claiming Apple to be the inventor of anything really as I recognize the fine heritage that other languages like Smalltalk offer.

However I do not think you are taking into account what a highly dyanmic language like Objective-C gives you, when you say that method calls are not typed checked at runtime - well that's the whole point really! That to me is a good thing, not something to be loked down on. I always approached Java in a way closer to Scheme anyway so really that is all well and good.

I am trying to think what DO means in this context but it is not ringing any bells, can you fill that one out? I don't think your claim of whatever dynamic system you are thinking of not being possible in Obejctive-C is correct, a more concrete example would be nice.

Re:Stealing is not bad

[cahiha]

when you say that method calls are not typed checked at runtime - well that's the whole point really!

What I'm referring to is that the argument types are not checked; you can call "foo:(int)" and it gets passed to a method that expects "foo:(char*)"; that is simply a hole in the Objective-C type system, not a useful feature.

I am trying to think what DO means in this context but it is not ringing any bells, can you fill that one out?

DO=Distributed Objects

I don't think your claim of whatever dynamic system you are thinking of not being possible in Obejctive-C is correct, a more concrete example would be nice.

Well, assume I do a "foo:(void*)", a "foo:(char*)", or even a "foo:(int*)"; how is Objective-C going to send the argument? Objective-C makes a set of choices and assumptions in these cases that are driven by the limitations of the C runtime. Java, C#, Python, Smalltalk, and lots of other languages don't limit you in that way: they can handle every built-in type correctly. That's why those languages not only can do DO better, you can also write better debugging, inspection, and other tools in them.

Re:30s gui? now i know what those win32*.* files a

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you also like to hear a song by the author of this article?

It's where Jeremy Reimer libels another person, and Jeremy Reimer (author of this article, heck this term paper where he spits back the ideas of others only re-reciting them) wrote and composed it:

http://www.pegasus3d.com/download/apksong2000+++.m p3

Jeremy Reimer is 33 years old and acts like a child and is an incredible idiot apparently. Some wanna be with no degree or professional experience in this field either.

Re:30s gui? now i know what those win32*.* files a

[Anonymous Coward]

news-reader.org/article.php?group=alt.fan.jeremy-r eimer & post_nr=5273

---

Author:Jeremy Reimer Subject:Re: Jeremy Reimer *IS* God!

Body:"Jeremy Reimer"

wrote in message news:

> Jeremy Reimer is the scale by which we should all measure the importence of our lives!!

> I agree with this brilliant man!

INDEED!

---

Unbelieveable. The author of this article from above, Jeremy Reimer, thinks he is GOD? Sounds like he is delusional.

Gore

[Anonymous Coward]

...'the truth of the story is that the GUI was developed by many different people over a long period of time'...

Wasn't Al Gore the sole inventor of the GUI?

Sketchpad

[graphicsguy]

I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention Ivan Sutherland's inspirational Sketchpad, from his 1963 dissertation.

Re:Sketchpad

[Cmdr TECO]

Yes. In the video at archive.org (I, II), Alan Kay talks about how Sketchpad was behind PARC's GUI work and object-oriented programming.

Far too much ephasis on saftey

[SuperKendall]

In my experience a high degree of saftey and type checking in a language is overrated. While it is useful it can also lead to inflexibility. Holes as you see them may be vanishingly small in real-world use, especially if you have expeirenced developers...

Would I want to man a team of ten green programmers in a large Objectsive C project? Not really. But I would indeed prefer Obejctive-C for a small team of two or three people who really knew what they were doing. And in all of these discussions I amtalking in the realm of applications development, not nessicarily large monolithic backend systems.

Now on to youd post:

Yes, just not a very good one, not even by historical standards.

That is either a very childish comment or based on a real lack of recent knowledge.

If XCode is "not very good" then I should fear to hear the verbage you'd use to desribe other declaritve development IDEs.

Well, and that's a good thing because Objective-C's support is incomplete and unsafe. Java and C#'s support is complete and safe. Unlike Objective-C, Java and C# also support persistence, inspection, remoting, and a host of other advanced features safely and completely.

And yet oddly it's also one of the few environments with a real answer to simple persistance using CoreData. Why is it that your message does not seem to jibe with reality?

Objective-C supports all the things you mention. You keep oscilating between it being "impossible" in Obejctive-C and then saying the support is "not very good". Sadly I lack the in-depth knowledge of Objective-C that I have with other languages and real-world development to fully refute your claims, but I can use the innate intuition of the experienced programmer to say with confidence "you are wrong".

The traditional way documents the intent better, supports better type checking, and works in many different languages. Having the language automatically turn method calls into data structures is a gimmick.

Again showing you can only think in the standard mode of programming and are not really getting your head into the message-passing realm. What you just laid out is so clumbsy really compared to message passing as a first class citizen...

Re:Far too much ephasis on saftey

[cahiha]

In my experience a high degree of saftey and type checking in a language is overrated. While it is useful it can also lead to inflexibility.

You appear to think that this is an argument about static vs. dynamic type checking, but I have no problem with dynamic type checking. The problem with Objective-C isn't that its object system is dynamically typed, the problem with Objective-C is the unsafe, inflexible, static type system it inherited from C.

Again showing you can only think in the standard mode of programming and are not really getting your head into the message-passing realm. What you just laid out is so clumbsy really compared to message passing as a first class citizen...

I got my head around that 25 years ago. I just think a programming language should get typing and memory management right before it attempts to support message passing OOP. Java is not the world's best OOL, but at least its type system and runtime are sound.

Holes as you see them may be vanishingly small in real-world use, especially if you have expeirenced developers...

Experienced programmers clearly are incapable of avoiding these holes, otherwise programs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX wouldn't be full of buffer overflow problems and pointer errors.

Not an argument about dyanmic vs. static

[SuperKendall]

You appear to think that this is an argument about static vs. dynamic type checking, but I have no problem with dynamic type checking. The problem with Objective-C isn't that its object system is dynamically typed, the problem with Objective-C is the unsafe, inflexible, static type system it inherited from C.

No. It's all about saftey. The fundamental question with saftey is - what are you protecting the code FROM. The answer is - yourself!!! That's why seeming "holes" are not as bad as you make them out to be under the right circumstances. Ad hoc developers build has "holes" like this all the time into systems where things can go bad quickly, but people learn how to work with the system so it does not do that. So lack of saftey in some situations to be is a total non-issue, especially for application development. You just make sure users cannot get into areas they should not.

I got my head around that 25 years ago. I just think a programming language should get typing and memory management right before it attempts to support message passing OOP. Java is not the world's best OOL, but at least its type system and runtime are sound.

But again in real life it appears to be working out quite well with a LOT of very high quality small shop apps for the Mac. The average Mac app is WAY better than the standard thrown-together-in-VB app that you see on Windows. As they say, the proof is in the pudding so obviosuly problems you have with the language are turning out not to be a big deal in practical use.

I have nothing against Java, belive me! It's still my primary language and I would even use it for application development in a lot of cases as I don't have the unreasonable fear of Swing or other Java GUI's people seem to have since I've build a few complex ones. I just think that XCode and Objective C is a great combination that lets you build REAL apps quickly. I have used a LOT of IDE's and so far it's really the one I think is most well rounded.

Experienced programmers clearly are incapable of avoiding these holes, otherwise programs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX wouldn't be full of buffer overflow problems and pointer errors

Sorry, I meant good in addition to experienced. And yes they make mistakes but on the whole a lot less. The error I think lies in the assumption that you can make a lnaguage so safe programmers cannot fail within in.

Re:Not an argument about dyanmic vs. static

[cahiha]

Sorry, I meant good in addition to experienced. And yes they make mistakes but on the whole a lot less. The error I think lies in the assumption that you can make a lnaguage so safe programmers cannot fail within in.

You are thinking of this as a binary decision, but this is a question of numbers. If a language eliminates 90% of the places where people can make mistakes without making the code more complex, then they will only make 10% as many errors as they would otherwise. That's true for good programmers as much as it is true for bad programmers. And the smaller number of errors means that they have even more time for tracking down the errors that actually remain.

The fundamental question with saftey is - what are you protecting the code FROM. The answer is - yourself!!!

Of course. And I know I can write 100000 lines of C code and make them work reliably because I have done that. I also know that doing so is a complete waste of time because there are tools that let me write the same code in 25000 lines of code with a few percent of the debugging effort involved. I like being protected from myself because it means I have to think less about things that aren't relevant to solving the problem at hand, and that's a good thing.

But again in real life it appears to be working out quite well with a LOT of very high quality small shop apps for the Mac. The average Mac app is WAY better than the standard thrown-together-in-VB app that you see on Windows. As they say, the proof is in the pudding so obviosuly problems you have with the language are turning out not to be a big deal in practical use.

Well, I think there are many things wrong with that argument, starting with the fact that the average Mac app probably isn't even written in Objective-C.

Non-Objective C Cocoa apps?

[SuperKendall]

ALl of the most intersting apps I've seen are Cocoa based. Given that, why would they NOT be written in XCode and Objective-C?

I've done some work with the Java->Cocoa bridge and that works OK. But if I'm writing ap app that's going to take full advanatage of the system there's no question Objective-C is the way to go.

The argument about the choice not being binary is exactly what I am saying. The holes you point out are hardly holes at all to someone who knows what they are doing - sure you CAN send an into to a method that takea string. But in practice if you're even a little careful it just really doesn't happen, or the results are so spectacular it's fixed quickly. The end result is still a solid stable app for the user.

In short, because most of the smaller Mac apps are very stable indeed I would submit there are few practical deficenies with the Objective-C/Cocoa combination as it exists today. More work can be done and is always welcome, but it's already operating at a pretty good plane of efficiency.

The comparison of 100000 C lines vs. 250000 lines of other code is WAY overblown. EVen if you are looking at code between Java and ObjectiveC, the gap will not be so wide. And indeed because of the dynamic runtime bundle hookup of GUI elements for most work you are doing the Objective-C code you actually write will be smaller than most Java or C# code.

Re:Non-Objective C Cocoa apps?

[cahiha]

ALl of the most intersting apps I've seen are Cocoa based. Given that, why would they NOT be written in XCode and Objective-C?

Many apps that go through Cocoa APIs seem to be based on code that wraps Cocoa in other languages or libraries. I think neither Office X, nor Mozilla, nor Safari are really Objective-C and Cocoa apps (although they may contain some).

But in practice if you're even a little careful it just really doesn't happen, or the results are so spectacular it's fixed quickly. The end result is still a solid stable app for the user.

But why even make the compromise? Smalltalk on Windows avoids all the type errors, gives you a better programming environment, and reaches a much larger market. Ditto for C#/.NET and many other languages and development environments.

The comparison of 100000 C lines vs. 250000 lines of other code is WAY overblown. EVen if you are looking at code between Java and ObjectiveC,

For Java, it is; for Java, the ratio is about 1:1. But there are many other excellent languages. Python is easily much smaller than Java or Objective-C.

Re:Non-Objective C Cocoa apps?

[SuperKendall]

Many apps that go through Cocoa APIs seem to be based on code that wraps Cocoa in other languages or libraries. I think neither Office X, nor Mozilla, nor Safari are really Objective-C and Cocoa apps (although they may contain some).

Safari is I believe (though probably not WebKit so much). But I'm really talking more about apps that are developed by a handful or even a single person - delicious library, SnapzPro, many small image apps, etc.

But why even make the compromise? Smalltalk on Windows avoids all the type errors, gives you a better programming environment, and reaches a much larger market. Ditto for C#/.NET and many other languages and development environments.

A common mistake that many people make. The range you can potentially reach with Windows users is much larger - or is it? A lot of Windows users I know never even look at shareware or anything like it. Plus developing whatever you are fighting a hige crowd of people.

Currently it makes far more sense to develop for the Mac where the market is more accepting of shareware, the dev tools produce apps that are well-integrated with the OS (like spellchecking for free in text areas never mind stuff like Core Data or Core Image) and you have far more of an ability to make a mark and get noticed with a really good product.

For Java, it is; for Java, the ratio is about 1:1. But there are many other excellent languages. Python is easily much smaller than Java or Objective-C.

But then there are other reasons not to go that route for apps as you know. For server side stuff, sure - well, perhaps. No one factor can be taken in a vaccum like that an Objective-C along with XCode has a very compelling and well-rounded feature set for app developers.