Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
You managed to forget Microsoft's BOB. What's your secret?
Smart Machines Blog
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.
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"