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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.'"

7 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Love of the Mouse by Janitha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Love of the Mouse by elgatozorbas · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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?

  3. And yet even this is simplified a good bit by mcc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
    1. Re:And yet even this is simplified a good bit by sydb · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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 :-(

      --
      Yours Sincerely, Michael.
  4. Re:Cool by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  5. Ever heard of Xanadu? by rmallico · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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..

    --
    sig goes here!
  6. Regions...the core of a fast GUI by mveloso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.