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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.'"
GUI screenshots.e s
/ acorn/
g s.html
n dex.shtml
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfac
Englebart's famous 1968 demo.
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
Acorn Archimedes GUI
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~lrtc/computers/acorn_ro
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/II
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/i
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Does this mean that MSN won the search-engine war?
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'.
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.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/nelson.html
sig goes here!
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.
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.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Well, google found this, which seems like a good start;t ml
http://jamesthornton.com/emacs/chapter/emacs_31.h
Then this one has some useful tips;
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs/DiredPower
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
From the article:
r amming
...
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_prog
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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).
Linux is really boring from an os standpoint. Now Plan 9......