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."
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.
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.
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!
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."
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"
"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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone