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.

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.