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A Non-Dogmatic History of the GUI

Posted by timothy on from the catmatic-is-better-anyhow dept.

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.'"

2 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Love of the Mouse by Janitha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Love of the Mouse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.