GUIs From 1984 to the Present

alewar writes "This nice gallery shows the evolution in the appearance of Mac OS, Microsoft Windows and KDE through the years, from the first version to the last available. Not technical, but still interesting to recall some memories from the good old days."

Comments

Better timeline

[zubernerd]

Man, must be a slowwwww news day...
Here is a link to a better timeline:

http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html Toasty Tech has some spiffy screenshots of various GUIs.
Ah, the memories...

Re:Better timeline

[alerante]

The GUIdebook also has tables showing the progression of specific interface elements (for example, icons).

Some corrections.

[Saven Marek]

The picture shown for System 5 is not a Mac system, rather it's a version of the Apple IIGS desktop.

The picture labelled as System 6 is a version of System 7, not System 6.

Re:Well then

[Overly Critical Guy]

Truly to say that the Graphic Engine in OSX and Vista are the same shows a complete lack of understanding. OSX graphics = WindowsXP with GDI+. The only exception is the Offscreen Bitmap Compose that OSX uses.

100% wrong. OS X uses a technology called Quartz, which is a totally different world above Windows XP's GDI+. It's vector-based and resolution-independent, and has been since its introduction six years ago. The same instructions used to draw to a printer are used to draw to the screen.

Vista has a full round trip Vector based Composer than does things OSX couldn't dream of like real, from Vector acceleration techniques (round trip) to GPU sharing and GPU RAM virtualization, stuff that has pushed NVidia and ATI to rethink the multi-tasking and Memory aspects of the GPU market. Yet MS is pulling this off with the current generation of Video cards.

Quartz is a vector-based layer, and Quartz 2D Extreme in Tiger/Leopard accelerates all GUI drawing operations via the GPU.

When I say that OSX is WindowsXP/GDI+ with only the addition of a Bitmap Composer, I am being serious.

No, you're being ignorant. Quartz is not Windows XP/GDI+ with "only the addition of a Bitmap Composer." You seem to know little about the Quartz Compositor layer in OS X.

OSX has no further graphic abilities than WindowsXP

Wow, so all those anti-aliased Quartz vector operations I've been doing are available in Windows XP? I can print the contents of any view to a printer automatically like I can with Quartz?

Please put down the MSDN marketing brochure before posting.

OS/2

[reporter]

The link at Toasty Tech is much better than the original link. The original link seems to be focused on the GUIs of operating systems (OSes) targeted at consumers, but the Toasty-Tech link presents the GUIs for all major OSes.

The original link notably omits OS/2.

Whereas Windows 3.1 was a cooperatively multitasked OS, OS/2 was a pre-emptively multitasked OS just like UNIX. OS/2 was rock solid. In opinion, it had only 2 problems. It was released just slightly ahead of its time: OS/2 needed, at least, an 80486 to be adequately fast even though most consumers were running computers that had an 80386, an 80286, or even an 8088.

The second problem was that IBM did not give it away for free. Windows 3.1 was, in general, inferior to OS/2 although Windows 3.1 was perfectly matched to the underpowered processors at the time. Windows 3.1 often crashed. Even when Windows did not crash, it often froze when an application neglected to cooperatively relinquish the processor. Windows 3.1 main advantage was that it had the Microsoft name on it. If IBM had open-sourced OS/2 or given it away for free, then IBM could have wrestled the entire OS market from Microsoft. Most consumers would have chosen a free, rock-solid OS over a more expensive, crappy OS. Being free is important since most consumers are cheapskates.

Also, Windows 3.1 was actually based on the core code on which IBM and Microsoft had collaborated. After they terminated the joint project, IBM continued development on the core code and turned it into OS/2. Meanwhile Microsoft gutted the parts (e.g., preemptive multitasking) that, in its opinion, the consumer would not value and morphed the result into Windows 3.1.

When you look at the APIs for both OS/2 and Windows 3.1, you can see the common heritage of both products. More than half of the APIs have identical or nearly identical names and arguments.

If the common ancestor of both products were called "Homo Erectus", then OS/2 is Cro-Magnon man, and Windows 3.1 is the chimp that preceded Homo Erectus.

Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment

[iamhassi]

"I judge articles based on whether or not I enjoyed them and that's it."

Yeah... but considering all the guy did was rip every from google images it's a bit disheartening:
Windows 1.0
Macintosh System 1
Macintosh System 3
Microsoft Windows 2.0

Or he stole them from Wikipedia: Macintosh System 7

He didn't even dig far either, he just ripped them from the first page of images that popped up.