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GUIs From 1984 to the Present
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Aug 13, 2006 12:33 PM
from the gooey-all-over-the-place dept.
from the gooey-all-over-the-place dept.
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."
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GUIs From 1984 to the Present
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Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://suso.suso.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 09 2004, @12:03AM)
Oh yeah, and where is the fucking Amiga desktop screenshot assholes?
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you enjoy it or not?
I personally couldn't care less why the blog was created, nor do I particularly care if people are posting things just to make money. I judge articles based on whether or not I enjoyed them and that's it.*
* Acknowledging, of course, that some sites go so overboard with the 500 page articles (composed of 200 total words) filled with ads that even if it might be the greatest article ever I don't read it.
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday February 16 2006, @06:22PM)
Yeah... but considering all the guy did was rip every from google images it's a bit disheartening:
Windows 1.0 [google.com]
Macintosh System 1 [google.com]
Macintosh System 3 [google.com]
Microsoft Windows 2.0 [google.com]
Or he stole them from Wikipedia: Macintosh System 7 [wikipedia.org]
He didn't even dig far either, he just ripped them from the first page of images that popped up.
Better timeline (Score:5, Informative)
(http://kc8alv.org/)
Here is a link to a better timeline:
http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html [toastytech.com] Toasty Tech has some spiffy screenshots of various GUIs.
Ah, the memories...
Re:Better timeline (Score:5, Informative)
(http://alerante.mine.nu/)
OS/2 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
They missed the most memorable (Score:4, Funny)
(http://perlworks.com/)
Re:They missed the most memorable (Score:5, Funny)
They are all in the same gallery as the Kernel Panic screens, the Apple System Bomb Messages, and the OSX Spontaneous Restart Screenshots.
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday August 26 2004, @03:14PM)
Some corrections. (Score:5, Informative)
The picture labelled as System 6 is a version of System 7, not System 6.
"GUIs"??? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.dfpresource.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday December 22 2004, @07:05PM)
What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://photo.net/photos/swillden | Last Journal: Wednesday July 19 2006, @01:42PM)
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.
And NeXTstep. The NeXTstep GUI circa 1992 looked a great deal like Mac OS X circa 2001 -- it was amazingly better than its contemporaries.
GNome, Window Maker and other leaders. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://lists.clickers.org/linuxsig/index.html | Last Journal: Friday November 09, @11:00PM)
Of course, everyone should see the first web browser from 1990 [w3.org] (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.
My desktop snapshot collection (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.digitalhermit.com/)
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!
Crap (Score:3)
Not exactly in depth (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.revis.co.uk/)
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:
DESQview? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday May 20, @05:49PM)
This is always fun (Score:3, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars [arstechnica.com]
Good Enough (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://jaytv.com/larrys/blog | Last Journal: Wednesday December 06 2006, @01:21PM)
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.
Windows ME? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ensilzah.deviantart.com/)
It's almost as if someone doesn't want to acknowledge it ever existed.
Apple copies Microsoft.... (Score:4, Funny)
Sad state of GUI development (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [google.de] 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.
merging command line and gui (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.daduh.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 20, @11:20AM)
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?
BOB? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/)
Too narrow (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.ucblockhead.org/journal/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 14 2002, @03:24PM)
Where's GNOME? (Score:3, Informative)
All fairly similar! (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Most Mac screenshots are incorrect (Score:3, Informative)
This asshat has no clue what he's posting. Check out the other links people have posted for real GUI histories.
In the days of win2k and ME (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 06 2005, @02:43AM)
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
Re:Well then (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Well then (Score:5, Funny)
(http://miyakohouou.dyndns.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 07 2004, @01:15AM)