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."

Comments

There were many.

[bmo]

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

Re:There were many.

[starfishsystems]

There's also a total neglect of the X Window System development at MIT, not to mention the various Lisp Machines and their graphical user interfaces which, drawing on the truly foundational work conducted at PARC and elsewhere, further explored the GUI paradigm and established some of its practical limitations.

The importance of building practical systems to test principles of human-computer interaction cannot be overemphasized. The early work by Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay and others was both innovative and empirical, but it dealt with various components of the GUI in isolation. Only by building a complete GUI system and putting it in front of a lot of people could we learn which elements were most successful and in what combinations.

For example, one of the ideas being particularly explored in the Lisp community at this time was how and to what extent the underlying objects should be manipulable through the GUI. Graphical copy-and-paste was a new but easily accepted idea. The obvious question, then, was whether such operations would do better to copy a representation of the object or the object itself. This parallelled a similar debate about the design of Lisp editors: whether these should be text editors in the spirit of Emacs or object editors which happened to offer a text representation. If I copy and paste a graphical representation of a file on the screen, under what conditions should that copy the file contents, the file itself, a link to the file, or the name of the file?

The answer, if you were to ask Microsoft or Apple at that time, would be equivalent to Henry Ford's "You can have any color you want as long as it's black." The Unix and Lisp world, meanwhile, were much more exploratory. No huge revelations come to mind, but in an incremental way it was these communities which established many of the GUI conventions we take for granted today. What has followed thereafter, for the most part, is merely eye candy.

Poorly written

[Jeremy Erwin]

Our brain is well suited to work with visual clues, and computers soon learned to use that.

What will computers think up next?

What does the future hold?

[sakdoctor]

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.

I don't usually make posts like this...

[sootman]

... 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.