GUIs From 1984 to the Present 263
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."
Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah, and where is the fucking Amiga desktop screenshot assholes?
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:2)
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:3, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:2)
Exactly. Or Xerox?
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:3, Insightful)
These kids today... They think personnal computers started with the Macintosh, the IBM PC and.... hum... Linux, which is younger than anything else on the market ATM, AFAIK.
Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Better timeline (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Better timeline GUIedbook, Mod up (Score:2)
Re:Better timeline (Score:2)
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.
Re:OS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, I'm pretty sure that the technology from the combined MS/IBM effort went into Windows NT, not Windows 3.1. (unless, of course, you meant
Re:OS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OS/2 (Score:3, Informative)
Like OS/2 the Amiga had preemptive multitasking and a GUI but in 1985.
Also left off the list was Visi0n, Topview, NextStep, and News. All in all a pretty crappy list.
Re:Better timeline (Score:2)
FlyaKiteOSX.
One package. No configuring needed.
They missed the most memorable (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:They missed the most memorable (Score:2)
Re:They missed the most memorable (Score:2)
Right, I have not seen XP blue screen, but it sure does hang, become unresponsive, not respond to input, and require a nice hard reset on occasion. Death but no blue screen is just as bad.
I worked on a dual AMD athlon 1800+ running linux for the last four years. Recently I switched to a dual Xeon running XP at 3.4 or so. The linux system was more responsive, able to actually multitask (switch between appliations smoothly) and never exhibited obvious slowdowns (adding mail to a folder takes seconds on XP
Re:They missed the most memorable (Score:2)
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:2)
Some corrections. (Score:5, Informative)
The picture labelled as System 6 is a version of System 7, not System 6.
Re:Some corrections. (Score:3, Funny)
Apple IIGS (Score:2)
This [wired.com] is a much better gallery of Apple GUIs.
GEM seems to be left out, as well as all the other "desktops" that predate MacOS, and were just as significant in contributions.
I do miss the multi-colored Apple menu as well as the a taking a byte out of the multi-colored Apple logo th
Another excellent source for this bit of history (Score:2, Informative)
Another good site to look at for GUI history is Nathan Whitehorn's "GUI Gallery" here: The GUI Gallery [toastytech.com]. I like it because Nathan is actively developing it. He actually loads and runs these various environments before writing about them.
Either that, or that boy has way too much time on his hands :-)
-ScottRe:Another excellent source for this bit of histor (Score:2)
Re:Another excellent source for this bit of histor (Score:2)
Bah! I remember that! Wow, when I first tried Linux and didn't know what the hell was going on and that virtual desktop confused teh hell out of me.
xerox workstation (Score:2)
microsoft (Score:2, Funny)
"GUIs"??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"GUIs"??? (Score:2)
-uso.
What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:3, Interesting)
-matthew
Re:What? No Amiga GUIs? (Score:3, Informative)
My desktop snapshot collection (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Hard comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
Not exactly in depth (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
Re:Not exactly in depth (Score:2)
Before you were born:
Now:
All in bright colors, syntax highlighting, autocomplete and autocorrect, and whatnot.
Sure it "could have been" done before. But only now it is actually in use.
DESQview? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:DESQview? (Score:2)
IIRC DESQview was controlled via the keyboard - while it was a windowing enviroment, it wasn't really a GUI.
nice, nice, but where is X,, BeOs, Os2 (Score:2)
but nice anyway
It goes to show you.... (Score:2)
Question: Why does it feel like everything "new" in software is a rewrite of stuff that has already been done in UNIX?
Re:It goes to show you.... (Score:2)
Because it is. Unix did it, but in a way that regular people couldn't figure out. It's still being re-written, except this time, it's being done in a much more useable way. The DVD is a re-write of VHS. The both do the same thing, but DVD does it better. Same thing.
This is always fun (Score:3, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars [arstechnica.com]
Error: GS OS is not System 5 (Score:2)
Good Enough (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good Enough (Score:2)
It actually seems to me that the macintosh gui remained stagnant and pretty horrifically uninspired for a number of years, whereas windows changed a lot and got to its 95ish style pretty quick.
things did change pretty quickly though after that; apple completely blew away the competition whereas windows stayed the same for three or four version (95, 98, 2k)... now it seems like vista may have caught up again a bit. hard to say though..
Re:Good Enough (Score:2)
Though it isn't so much the display holding things back now, but the input interfaces.
Precise, cheap, unencumbering 3D entry that easily tracks all your hand, finger and arm motions, or reliable, speaker independent, speech recognition would bring about a new round of change.
Windows ME? (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost as if someone doesn't want to acknowledge it ever existed.
Re:Windows ME? (Score:2)
Apple copies Microsoft.... (Score:4, Funny)
No GEOS (Score:2)
Apple and MS implementation (Score:2)
Having seen and used most of these interfaces, the driving force seems to be the hardware to run them and then an API to make them cheap enough to implement for consumer applications. System 1 was a basic GUI built run on a relatively simple hardware and in a small footprint. The innovation was in fact in the separate GPU, somethin
Re:Apple and MS implementation (Score:2)
Excuse my ignoramicousness, but what's GPC? Was the G a typo, or does that mean something else?
"Nice" Gallery? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Nice" Gallery? (Score:2)
Oh, like a dagger in the heart!
I too was disappointed by the incompleteness (and inaccuracy) of the page. Oh well...
Re:"Nice" Gallery? (Score:2)
Was it? This keeps confusing me. I thought the Amiga GUI was part of the AmigaOS ROMs, as the "Intuition" libraries or whatever they were - with "Workbench" as an optional desktop, comparable perhaps to explorer.exe or the KDE kicker/konqueror combo. After all, you'd always get a full windowing environment even when you booted off an empty floppy/harddisk. And you could quit Workbench, but not the GUI.
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.
Re:Sad state of GUI development (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sad state of GUI development (Score:2)
There are actually some experimental cars with joysticks and a autopilot for cars is also already quite doable, at least on some roads.
The throuble with GUIs is however very different, the reason why GUIs need improvements isn't because of originality, but because they simply don't work the way they are now. There are tons of tasks that you can do very easily CLI, but not a
merging command line and gui (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:merging command line and gui (Score:2)
There is nothing wrong with that, in fact a proper command line completion script for bash will do exactly the same and limit tab completion to what makes sense in the current context (complete only to files matching *.mp3 when using a mp3 tool, complete to options when cursor is at a '--', etc.). But why does a GUI actually limit the amount of action it can perform? Not just in the "don't clutt
Re:Sad state of GUI development (Score:2)
In some cases it's better than that. In Mac OS X, for instance, if you drag a file from the Finder to a Terminal window, it inserts the filename of that file on the command line, and if you select an absolute filename in the Terminal and drag it to an application in the Dock, it tries to open that file in that application. If you select some text in the Terminal and drag i
Re:Sad state of GUI development (Score:2)
BOB? (Score:5, Funny)
Too narrow (Score:3, Informative)
OK, but where is... (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Apple vs Microsoft (Score:2)
Anyone remember when Apple sued Microsoft [wikipedia.org] over the GUI?
Ever notice that Microsoft is always one step behind Apple when it comes to it's operating system? Whose the true copy cat?
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.
Disk Doubler! (Score:2)
Judging from TFA, my first exposure to a Mac (after using an Atari 520ST for a couple of years) was an already antiquated Mac Plus running System 3 - I remember that ugly-ass diamond desktop pattern. Even the hardly cutting-edge eMac I'm typing on now would l
Sloppy workmanship (Score:2)
Memories! (Score:2)
In the days of win2k and ME (Score:3, Insightful)
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
It sure does. (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Well then (Score:2, Interesting)
I so wish I didn't have an NDA...
Truly to say that the Graphic Engine in OSX and Vista are the same shows a complete lack of understanding. OSX graphics = WindowsXP with GDI+. The only exception is the Offscreen Bitmap Compose that OSX uses.
Vista has a full round trip Vector based Composer than does things OSX couldn't dream of like real, from Vector acceleration techniques (round trip) to GPU sharing and GPU RAM virtualization, stuff that has pushed NVidia and ATI to rethi
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:3, 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.
This is a nonsensical argument, just GDI+ operations are also resolution-independent, based on vectors (of course, lines and fonts and such are after all vector-based) and does map directly to printers. As it happens, so d
Re:Well then (Score:2)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/coreanimation. html [apple.com]
Re:Well then (Score:2)
Re:Well then (Score:2)
Re:Well then (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well then (Score:2)
Very nice. Does Vista also provide you with enough hands and peripherals so you can play them all at the same time?
Re:Well then (Score:2)
DRN is in Vista for two reasons:
1 Business wants it for documents. Internal controls, legal requirements, whattever.
2 The major content providers demand it for media. Books, music and video. Your neighbors aren't ahelling out the big bucks for home theater gear to feed the P2P nets. They are buying it to watch the movies.
No one will be jumping through hoops to get what D
Re:Well then (Score:2)
Re:Gnome (Score:3)
Re:Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gnome (Score:2)
Re:slashdot appearance (Score:2)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.slashdot.