The Real History of the GUI

Big Nothing writes "Mike Tuck @ webmasterbase.com has written a piece on the development of GUIs. Like most other articles on webmasterbase.com it is fairly non-technical, but entertaining nonetheless." Update: 08/21 02:45 AM GMT by T : Note that the link above takes you to the print-friendly version of the story; for online reading, you might prefer this version instead.

Re:GUI

[SquadBoy]

The answer is you are using Netscape 4.7 under *nix and have not done anything to fix your fonts. Upgrade to Mozilla tweak your fonts and it should look much better.

Yay GEM!

[Aerog]

Nice to see they mentioned the good ol' Atari ST! I managed to get one a couple years back and it's quite possibly the coolest antiquated piece of technology I own today, and the GUI is very, very impressive for the time. It works, (although finding discs for the 720k floppy drive is a pain in the ass) and has one of the best versions of Monopoly available today, not to mention that the OS is just as stable as Win98, and about 1/500th the size. Yeah, yeah, it doesn;t support everything, but then again, who wants a USB printer on a 16-year-old machine?

Just need to figure out a hack to hook it into my network now /* extreme sarcasm */. . . . .

I was going to rip this article a new one, but..

[Bowie J. Poag]

I was going to rip this article a new one, but i'm glad they got it right. What I would consider to be the first GUI was Sutherland's "Sketchpad" system from the early 60's. The military had similar sorts of things predating Sutherland, but nothing quite flexible enough to really be called a full blown GUI.

Anybody with their brains in the right place can tell you that the GUI was not invented by Xerox PARC. They may have done a great deal to push the idea, or perhaps simply been at the right place at the right time, but the basic idea of using graphics as a means to interact with a machine predates PARC by about 20 years.

If you really wanna have some fun, check out Doug Englebart's 1968 presentation that introduced the world to the mouse, chordboard and other interesting stuff. There are plenty of links to it, but here's a good one [rwth-aachen.de] incase you cant find any. A while back, there was a site that offered his entire presentation in RealVideo format, IIRC..I wish someone would post a link to it, or perhaps a better (re: DivX, or straight MPEG) link... It almost brings tears to my eyes when I watch it. :)

Re:finally Smalltalk gets its dues

[Anonymous Coward]

The article got one thing wrong though. The Lisa's software wasn't written in Smalltalk. Like most of the industry, Apple totally failed to recognize the promise of object oriented programming back then.

Also, I don't agree with your assessment that only languages with built-in single rooted class heirarchies count as "pure OO". The single rooted class heirarchy is necessary to support a dynamic type system, but isn't required in a statically typed OO language.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Windows/386 - which was a full 32-bit version of 2.0 was the first Windows to take advantage of the 80386's features. He states that Windows 3.0 was, although it was actually an enhancement to W/386 that dropped support for the 80286 and relied exclusively on 32-bit mode.

No. Windows/386 was not 32-bit. The Win32 API first came out as an add-on to Windows 3.1, which was still a 16-bit OS. MS didn't offer a 32-bit OS until WinNT, which was followed by Win95. Windows 2.0 was purely real mode, cooperative multitasking only. Windows/286 (and later 2.11) provided support for 286 protected mode and pre-emptive multitasking, and Windows/386 provided support for the "386 enhanced" or virtual mode which provided premption for real mode tasks and a separate memory space for each real mode app. Windows 3.0 provided a choice of 3 modes: real, protected, or 386 enhanced, so it supported not only the 80286 but the 8086 as well. Support for the 286 wasn't dropped until WinNT and Win95.

He also skipped right over IBM LanManager, which was the precursor to OS/2.

Sigh... No, Lan Manager was a service that ran on top of OS/2.

Finally gets Xerox/Apple right

[TheInternet]

At last, somebody actually gets this right:

"Apple negotiated a deal with Xerox; in return for a block of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his team to tour PARC, take notes, and implement some of the ideas and concepts being bounced around at PARC in their own creations."

Pirates seriously messed with history in this regard, having never touched on the deal Jobs made with Xerox, and the made-up commentary by the "Wozniak" character.

But on the downside, the author doesn't spell Jef Raskin correctly.