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GUI Revolutions: From Flashing Bulbs To Windows 8
StormDriver writes "GUI has been with us for years and it went a long, long way since the early days. There were some fairly interesting developments along the way, so we took the time to line them up for you."
This article doesn't scratch the surface, and looks more like an advertisement for Windows 7 and 8.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100101033213/http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
There's history for ya.
Wayback Machine mirror so as to not nuke the poor guy's site.
--
BMO
I don't see mobile GUI's in there. Surely Palm's early offerings qualify as a "before" and iOS & Android as an "after" ... and Magic Cap as in "in between". Desktops aren't the only place we use GUI's.
Our brain is well suited to work with visual clues, and computers soon learned to use that.
What will computers think up next?
In future, all screens will be touchscreen, even your main PC monitor. The major breakthrough was the self-lubricating touchscreen. It's naturally oily, and hypo-allergenic, requiring no cleaning.
Of course, the mouse driven paradigm needed to be scrapped completely, in favour of a adult finger-painting gesture system. Mod someone down on slashdot? There's a gesture for that. There's an intuitive gesture for absolutely everything. Just install the gesture localization pack.
True, I can't find any of my LOCAL applications any more, but that's fine because I can just google for them, and they'll turn up some place.
It's going to be a good future.
Oh, so it looks like we went from blinkenlights to terminals to Windows without stopping, and any form of interface other than that is either irrelevant or obsolete. I guess they actually consider it the end-all and be-all.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Vi rules, eh?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Task switching without hint as to how much further to the task you are actually looking for, only allowing non-overlapping windows. It's essentially Windows 1.0 on those fronts.
Microsoft saw iPhone acheieve apparent success making a giant phone, and MS wants every desktop to be that way. Further making things worse, they are ignoring the market reality and declaring WP7 the most awesome interface for phones and giant phones.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Windows 3.0 was evolutionary, and it evolved in parallel with Unix GUIs since Microsoft was involved with Motif. This is why for many years you could sit down at either a Windows machine or a typical Unix machine, whether it came from IBM, Sun, or some other source, and apprehend the basic windowing functions.
The next GUI revolution is in reality overlay. Ideally you all but eliminate any interface but pupil tracking, voice, and gesture. A small device (like a cellphone) has enough interface surface. Gestures would be kept to a minimum, but they have real use, especially in collaborative computing.
There won't be a true GUI revolution since PARC's interface tests (or, arguably, The Demo) until someone comes up with a useful three-dimensional (immersive) user interface. That, in turn, requires much higher-resolution displays, or fundamentally different (and probably head-mounted) displays, such as a laser-based vector/raster combo. But the reality overlay of today is pretty fundamentally different from the way GUIs have been used up to now. And of course, the technology has been used in fighter aircraft for some time...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
An article supposed to present a huge history of GUI development, which has "Windows 8" in the title a few days after it was demoed for the first time? Sounds like the article will be something thrown hastily together to jump on the "hype" bandwagon rather than an insightful article about history...
"Am I the only person who would actually prefer the Windows 3.1 .. a nice "desktop" that you can organise how you like .. without things popping up at random places on the screen"
A combination of Novell Netware and Xtree done for me or even Midnight Commander
I've used Sharepoint at work and don't see the attraction. It was hard to use and impossible to maintain a dynamic document store like MediaWiki. You have to check out the document, open it in Word, make changes, save the document to a known location, exit Word, then check it back in vs clicking Edit in MediaWiki, making your changes and saving it.
I do have managers doing interesting stuff with it, embedding statistical spreadsheets and creating graphs but those things aren't things I do on a day to day basis as a Unix Admin. I need to be able to quickly find a document and then make changes if needed.
Last I heard, there was some problem with our SharePoint back end server that was preventing the upgrade to the new version which has a wiki as part of the tool. In the mean time, other departments have deployed MediaWiki and are documenting their processes and procedures on the fly. They're finding it so much easier that they're migrating the documents off of SharePoint and to the wiki.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
... but wow, what a fanboyish piece of shit. There is nearly no mention of Apple after its origin.
Leading into Windows 1 (after talking about Xerox, the Lisa, and the first Mac) he says "The era of GUI's was about to start. But apple [sic] was not meant to be the king."
Oh really?
- Vista copied many features straight out of Tiger
- I think we can all agree that WP7 would not look like it does if the iPhone had never been on the scene
- And now, after ten years of making poorly-selling tablets, Apple has shown how it should be done and MS is falling over themselves trying to catch up
I'm not saying Apple has never copied anything either, but once the article hits Windows 1.0, it is all about MS. He goes from Windows 3 to Microsoft Bob, lays down exactly 10 words about Windows 95, then goes straight to XP, Vista, and 7. He dismisses over two decades of Mac OS with the words "In the meantime, Mac OS was undergoing a similar, slow evolution."
He then says "Last couple of years were really eventful. New families of computing devices became wildly popular -- smartphones, netbooks, tablets. Mobile operating systems became almost as complex and capable as desktop ones. Multi touch technologies challenged the age-old interface design, and required new approaches. And now Microsoft tells us the future belongs to tiles." and the rest of the article is about Windows 8 and tiles. REALLY? No mention at all of the iPhone, who was the first to market with multitouch, even if they didn't invent it? No mention of Palm, or WinCE or BeOS or the Amiga or a million other omissions? Come on. If he isn't a shill, he's got a BIG set of blinders on. If you want to see the history of GUIs, go here. They have a ridiculously thorough collection of screenshots.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The article re-hashes the obvious.
There's a whole history of early graphical user interfaces from the pre-computer and early computer era.
One of the neater ones was the Panama Canal lock control boards, built by General Electric in 1913. This was a long desk with a symbolic model of the locks. The water level in each lock is represented by the tall indicators. The lock gate positions are represented by aluminum pointers. The protective chain lifted into position to protect the first lock gates from a runaway ship was represented by a little metal chain. The locks themselves are represented by a long strip of blue-grey stone. (The first GUI theme!) The valves are controlled by water faucets, and the gates by handles.
All this is interlocked mechanically, so, for example, that the lock gates can't be opened unless the water levels are equal on both sides. The handles will physically not turn. That technology was borrowed from railroad signalling.
Another system of historical interest is General Railway Signal's NX interlocking system., from 1936. This is the very beginning of "user-friendly" GUIs. Previously, interlocked systems in railroad signalling, and the Panama Canal system, just prevented the operator from doing prohibited operations. NX was the first system which showed the operator all the currently valid options, let the user select one, and took care of the details of making it happen. It's well worked out. The operator selects the entrance point where a train is entering the interlocking. The system figures out all the currently valid exit points, taking into account other trains currently present, conflicting routes, etc., and lights up illuminated buttons on the track diagram for each currently allowed exit point. The operator then selects one exit point. The system then moves all the track switches as necessary, waits until they're set and locked in the correct position, then sets the signals along the route to clear. As the train passes through the interlocking, the signals change to "stop" behind it, and the track sections and switches are automatically freed up for other trains. At all times, there's at least one stopping distance of red-signaled track between any two trains, and any switch in a green-signaled section cannot be moved until the train clears it. The New York City subway system still uses this technology, along with mechanical train stop devices at every signal which, if up, will hit an air valve on each subway car and stop the train. There's a simulator if you're interested.
It's worth understanding the big display-board systems of the past. Many of them had better human interfaces than modern systems.
You've combined some reasonable obervations with some unsound conclusions.
We've seen in the past some alternatives done by people without greed on their mind (at least in the beginning) which then promptly get offered massive sums of money that only an idiot would turn down in exchange for selling out to some big company ... which then turns it into exactly what you say.
Yes, except that there is the occasional "idiot" who doesn't sell out. They are the people you don't hear about. By keeping the world talking about the big winners (by some moulded definition of winner), you keep people chasing the dragon. Unfortunately, the guy who remains true to himself tends to get obsoleted by an inferior copy with better marketing, so either way you're fucked :-).
Anarchy doesn't work in efficiently enough to be useful beyond a small size, I challenge you to show me an example of it working.
Trying to engineer a system where power remains as distributed as possible is not anarchy. On the contrary, it requires many rules to prevent power concentrating. The non-cynic would say this was a primary aim of the founders of the US.
Wikipedia is more or less a failure
Wikipedia was, from the start, an MMORPG with Jimbo Wales as monarch. Official and unofficial processes are thoroughly undemocratic and deliberately promote cronyism. Wales is just another businessman-evangelist who has won fame and fortune with false promises and volunteer labour from the faithful. I tip my hat to the bearded embezzling shyster - he really knows his game.
Competition and diversification in our own species is what keeps us from going extinct.
Competition results in consolidation results in globalisation results in one very homogenised planet relying on a few large power structures. This is quite the opposite of the diversification required for survival, where people cooperate independently rather than submit to centralised control.
raping you for EVERYONE elses gain,
Don't believe everything you read. Especially not the propaganda of the winner.