The Real History of the GUI 265
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.
Am I the only one who misses the CLI ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The world would be a better place if GUIs had never been invented.
Give me an Xterm, emacs and lynx over a point-and-slobber interface anyday.
do we really need more of this (Score:2, Insightful)
Make up for what Windows lacks (Score:2, Insightful)
GUI 'simplicity'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I beg to differ. You could say I've kind of been enlightened after listening to the epitome of computer cluelessness: my mother.
She was struggling with the Windows explorer GUI, trying to move a file. And then, she said, and I'm not kidding: "Oh, I prefered DOS, you know, you typed a command, and it worked!"
Maybe what simplicity is really about, is determinism in the way the computer behaves?
Re:Am I the only one who misses the CLI ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only one who misses the CLI ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Chris Beckenbach
Some corrections regarding the Alto (Score:5, Insightful)
The Alto itself didn't really have a GUI. What it had were graphical applications. One of them was Smalltalk, which had its own private windowed environment. Another was Bravo, the first WYSIWYG multi-font editor. You could write other applications yourself, in Mesa, Xerox's own language, or BCPL, in which the underlying tools were written. The underlying environment was a single-task command line environment comparable to early DOS.
Bravo was used as the programmer's editor. The internal representation of Bravo documents was ASCII text, followed by a control-Z, followed by the formatting information. The command-line tools, which understood control-Z as EOF, could thus happily process Bravo documents. Programs for the Alto were normally written in proportional fonts, with boldface and italics as needed.
The Alto hardware itself was built by Data General under contract to Xerox. It was basically a Data General Nova with custom microcode in a desk-height rackmount case containing the computer and a 14" removable disk cartridge drive (equivalent to a DEC RK05, if anybody cares.) The display, a portrait-mode b/w full-page display built at PARC, was the main hardware innovation, along with the 3MB Ethernet and the mouse.
The Alto project had several components. First was the concept of a number of single-user workstations connected by a network providing dedicated services. Each Alto had very limited disk space, but file servers were available. All serious storage was on the file server. There was also a print server, an Alto connected to a modified Xerox copier. PARC management was working on the assumption that, although all this was far too expensive to deploy, in time the hardware would get cheaper and it would be useful. They were right. The fact that they then blew the business aspect wasn't PARC's fault.
The other big push was Alan Kay's Dynabook. Kay was big on simulation and teaching kids to use computers. His real direction for Smalltalk was what we today disparaginly call "edutainment", games with educational intent. This seems strange now, but that's where he was going. He's continued with that direction, at the Media Lab and elsewhere. But it never took off.
PARC tried to commercialize the technology as the Xerox Star. This wasn't a general-purpose system; it was more like a really good dedicated word processor. Wang then ruled that market, with what was called "shared logic word processing", dumb terminals all running one common application on a time-shared host. This was cheap enough offices could afford it.
The Star, with a real computer at every desk, a big display, and a LAN, did roughly the same function, but at higher cost. It was cool, but didn't sell. It was a closed system; you ran the Star app, and that was it. PARC didn't trust the users to mess with the system, so you couldn't do anything they hadn't anticipated.
The computer scientists at PARC didn't see that the future was open systems running unreliable software. Really. That was the missed vision. Nobody dreamed that something like DOS, let alone non-protected mode multitasking, would end up in clerical offices. Obviously, it would break all the time, files would get lost, and the cost to the organization would be enormous. Remember, Xerox was a rental company back then; if the copier broke, it was Xerox's problem. So they took reliability very seriously. And, sadly, it cost them.