GUIs From 1984 to the Present

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."

Re:Obligatory disgruntled sarcastic comment

[Ant P.]

Anyone else noticed the linked-to "blog" has no other content besides this and is one day old?

What? No Amiga GUIs?

[rubberbando]

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.

Re:Well then

[TheNetAvenger]

OSX 10.1 looks better than Vista!

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 rethink the multi-tasking and Memory aspects of the GPU market. Yet MS is pulling this off with the current generation of Video cards.

That is why I can run Halo, WoW, SWG, and Half-Life ALL on screen at once and not lose framerates in any of the games. I can even Flip 3D them, and they run in that view without any FPS loss. (See normally, each of these applicaitons would want 'full' access to the GPU and the GPU's RAM.)

I know it is cool to compare OSX to Vista, but really, we need to get everyone educated, if not, then people with see the technology in OSX as 'good enough' and we won't get Apple to move into the next generation of Video Composers and Rendering.

When I say that OSX is WindowsXP/GDI+ with only the addition of a Bitmap Composer, I am being serious. OSX has no further graphic abilities than WindowsXP, where Vista has new engine and also a new paradigm for Video Cards and GPUs as well.

Re:Gnome

[CarpetShark]

I went back to KDE after about half an hour ;)

GNome, Window Maker and other leaders.

[twitter]

All should show up pre 1999. They look just as good as Windows 98 did and were widely deployed and easy to get. They might also have included a screen shot of TWM to show how things progressed.

• TWM, 1987 [wikipedia.org]
• FVWM, 1993 [wikipedia.org] (Enlightenment puts it at 1992)
• Next Step publishes Open Step [wikipedia.org] which is quickly followed by
• AfterStep, Window Maker and others much nicer than Windows 95. Most are still available and usable with the latest and greatest free software.
• Enlightenment, released 1996 [sourceforge.net], still a leader.
• Gnome used Enlightenment until they moved to Sawfish. The history has just begun

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?

[eyewhin]

I agree. Amiga blew them all away. Too bad that Commodore so totally sucked at marketing :-( Ironically, the thing that did the Amiga in back then was that people believed it was a gaming computer. Today, the only thing that is keeping MS ahead is the lack of game ports to other OS's. I miss my Amiga.

Re:What? No Amiga GUIs?

[misleb]

Did the AmigaOS provide much in the way of APIs and hardware abstraction? I was under the impression that most amiga programs worked directly with the hardware much of the time. That could have been a significant hurdle for general software development.

-matthew

Re:OS/2

[misleb]

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.

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 Windows NT 3.1).

It always puzzled me as to why Microsoft would think that consumers would want to use a crappy version of Windows and not NT. Was it just because NT didn't have good (or any) DOS support?

-matthew

Re:OS/2

[hypnotik]

Actually, Microsoft wanted to use the NT for consumers. As you said, it didn't have good DOS support. However, NT needed a mamoth machine at the time to run. That's why it got released for "servers" in the anticipation that they would be a bit beefier hardware.