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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."
There is only one thing I like more than desktop screenshot timelines, and that is when image links that are 320x240 pixel size take me to an image that is 400x300 pixels in size when I click on it.
Oh yeah, and where is the fucking Amiga desktop screenshot assholes?
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...
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
And just where is the blue screen of death
A lot of the screenshots show highly customized desktops (look at the KDE 3.5 shot), which makes a comparison difficult. They're also all in low-resoultion JPEG format, which seems an odd choice...
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.
Another good site to look at for GUI history is Nathan Whitehorn's "GUI Gallery" here: The GUI Gallery. I like it because Nathan is actively developing it. He actually loads and runs these various environments before writing about them.
Either that, or that boy has way too much time on his hands :-)
-ScottMy other sig is a Glock
The 'O' in the MS logo from 1985 kinda looks like a goatse..
An inclusive statement like that should include GUIs from the early 60s (SKETCHPAD) through the Englebart demo through Xerox Star, GEOS on the C64, the Amiga Workbench, Atari GEM, etc... Why only show the PC and Mac?
Mostly random stuff.
It would have been nice to see some pics of the Amiga GUIs, year by year to show how much nicer they were at the time compared to Apple's and Microsoft's.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
1994:
> ls -a
1997:
~ ls -a
1998:
tardis ~ ls -a
2001:
[kll@apocalypse] ls -a
2004:
[kll@helios] ssh apocalypse hostname
apocalypse
2006:
[kll@xm-fc5-001] ssh localhost
password:
Virtual Machine - FC5 - Image 001
Be nice!
Small pictures, no captions, HUGE omissions, screenshots of OSes not even out yet... why was this posted again?
when comes to KDE at least. Since with enough effort, KDE can look like any of those. Not a Gnome user myself, but some screenshots of it would have been nice for comparison at least.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I might add that there is a distinct lack of console love as well. I demand equal treatment for bash! Show me the ~$
Before you were born:
After you are dead:
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
They forgot DESQview, the preferred environment for running your BBS software
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Maybe it's just me, but the look of GUIs seemed to devolve from the initial Mac 1984 system 1 version, until about 1995. The look just got uglier and more cluttered, and color when it was introduced had no real aesthetic, this was probably due in part to display limitations. In 1995 both Mac and Windows finally arrive at reasonably attractive, colorful, and functional versions. KDE sets the bar a little higher in 1998 then stagnates, Mac catches up with X 10.5 and Windows should catch up with Vista.
Rail against GUIs if you must, but without some vastly improved display system they have converged a stable solution that will probably stay mostly unchanged much like QWERTY typewriters, not because there isn't anything better possible, but because they are good enough, and are what everyone knows.
Letter To Iran
What, no mention of Windows ME?
It's almost as if someone doesn't want to acknowledge it ever existed.
If these screenshots are corret, we now have proff that Apple copied Microsofts idea about using colors!
The author of this blurb terms this gallery "nice", and the author of the Web page itself titles it " The Evolution of Desktops". Huh? At best, it is a collection of Windows and Macintosh screenshots. What's missing? The XEROX object-oriented (old sense) GUI, any version of GEM, TopView, X-Windows, Lisa, the Mach interface, the various commercial non-X-Windows UNIX interfaces and whatever the Amiga used.
Once you go XFCE, you never go back...
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Looking at those 20 year old GUIs always makes me sad, since it shows how basically nothing has changed since then. We got more colors, higher resolutions and a few more mouse buttons, but the basic user interaction is still very much the same as back then and still flawed in many ways. For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side, where the most 'integration' you get is lausy copy&paste support of filenames from GUI to CLI, however not the other way around. But thats really just the tip of the iceberg, computer interfaces could do so much more, but most of them don't even try. Don't get me wrong, some transparency, drop shadows and other effects can help, but they are really just polishing of something that is broken at a much deeper level.
As another drastic example of the lack of GUI progress one can look at this NeXTSTEP presentation from 1992, even today that video still shows plenty of features which a normal Linux or Windows still can't compete with and with MacOSX it doesn't really look that much better, while it is actually based on NeXTSTEP, it has allocated a whole bunch of cruft from old MacOS, which doesn't really make the overall experince all that good.
And just where is the blue screen of death
They are all in the same gallery as the Kernel Panic screens, the Apple System Bomb Messages, and the OSX Spontaneous Restart Screenshots.
OSX 10.1 looks better than Vista!
I so wish I didn't have an NDA...
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.
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.
That is why I can run Halo, WoW, SWG, and Half-Life ALL on screen at once and not lose framerates in any of the games. I can even Flip 3D them, and they run in that view without any FPS loss. (See normally, each of these applicaitons would want 'full' access to the GPU and the GPU's RAM.)
I know it is cool to compare OSX to Vista, but really, we need to get everyone educated, if not, then people with see the technology in OSX as 'good enough' and we won't get Apple to move into the next generation of Video Composers and Rendering.
When I say that OSX is WindowsXP/GDI+ with only the addition of a Bitmap Composer, I am being serious. OSX has no further graphic abilities than WindowsXP, where Vista has new engine and also a new paradigm for Video Cards and GPUs as well.
You managed to forget Microsoft's BOB. What's your secret?
Smart Machines Blog
Where's Amiga? Where's Atari? Where's OS/2? Where's Gnome? Where's BeOS?
The cake is a pie
I went back to KDE after about half an hour ;)
Of course, everyone should see the first web browser from 1990 (actually a screen shot from 1993, but much the same) running on a Next.
It might be hard to dig up screenshots all of desktops, but not much harder than the ones they found. It's nice to see someone including KDE in the line up so people can see a little of what they have been missing, like Virtual desktops, since the early 90's.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... GEOS, GEM, The Amiga, The Atari ST and other very important GUIs of the era??! The title should rather be something else than what it is.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
...or NeXTSTEP, or Amiga, et cetera.
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.
Quartz is a vector-based layer, and Quartz 2D Extreme in Tiger/Leopard accelerates all GUI drawing operations via the GPU.
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.
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.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
"For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side,[...]"
How would you do this? A GUI is intended to provide simplicity by limiting choice to only those options relevant within a given context. Further, it uses visual metaphor to classify objects and data. CLIs use symbolic representation and grammar to organize files and actions, and as such are closer to reading, writing, and speech than a visual interpretation of system state. It's the difference between looking at a graph vs. a table of numbers - both portray the same information, but require different regions of the brain to interpret. Perhaps the problem you lament is not the computer interface, but limitations and differences between how people manipulate visual compared to manipulating the system with symbols and words. These are two distict areas in the brain - why should they work alike?
The cool thing about all this is that any one of us that was familiar with one desktop could definately sit down at any of the other desktops, even from 20yrs ago (or 20yr ago if we somehow got into a time machine and came to today), and be perfectly comfortable.
The basic premises of all these UIs is the same. This leads me to believe that in another 20yrs we will still be using the same folder/file idea that we have today. This is, I think, a good thing. It means that our damn grandkids won't be able to make fun of us for not being able to use the computer! But we can still tell them to get off our damn lawns!
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Rather useless little thing. System 5 is mistakenly called System 4 (there was no 4), and a IIgs screenshot becomes "System 5". System 7 shows up here as "System 6", and System 7.5 (it's even in the damn screenshot!) is now "System 7"
This asshat has no clue what he's posting. Check out the other links people have posted for real GUI histories.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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.
This is a nonsensical argument, just GDI+ operations are also resolution-independent, based on vectors (of course, lines and fonts and such are after all vector-based) and does map directly to printers. As it happens, so did the stuff in MacOS 9 and GDI prior to Windows 2000, which makes both sides of the argument quite invalid. These are simply long-known features.
Quartz is a vector-based layer, and Quartz 2D Extreme in Tiger/Leopard accelerates all GUI drawing operations via the GPU.
Quartz 2D Extreme is however extremely unrealiable and thus disabled in both.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.
Feel free to point out where the difference lies, as far as I can see the composition layer in GDI+ is indeed a pretty straight match to the one in Quartz.
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?
Well, yes and yes.
In the end the arguments here are simply too simplistic, with a simple checkbox approach to evaluating technology GDI+ indeed does well against Quartz, in reality Quartz is a much more modern and at the same time mature approach. On the other hand it seems equally clear that Vista graphics does leapfrog Quartz, unless Quartz 2D Extreme manages to prove itself in the future (the problem is that there is a bit of a mismatch between GPU functionality and the classic Quartz rendering, whereas the Windows Presentation Foundation have been very much designed with GPU implementation in mind, giving it a bit of an edge).
Whether this is relevant or not is highly arguable however, Quartz software is extremely speedy, and Quartz Extreme (the compositor part that actually works that is) does offload the most performance-critical step. Microsoft should have some kudos for the great design of the Windows Presentation Foundation, but Apple may actually be better served keeping the small rendering operations in software where it is easy and flexible to maintain the best possible predictable quality of graphics. The performance difference is most likely small in practice.
No, actually he's under an NDA from Apple, which is why he couldn't post anything that described how Quartz actually works.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
There was Enlightenment, that sucker WAS SEXY!
:(
Still one of the sexiest in existence, people with 2 button mice suffered and they never really fixed that but it's a pretty pretty baby.
It's also one of the smallest and quickest GUI's around.
Wish it shipped standard