Talk:History of the graphical user interface

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Older discussion[edit]

The organization of the intro par. of this article is absurd. Windows is not the culmination of the GUI, of which all other GUIs are merely predecessors. Also rest of this article is sloppy and NPOV. Guess I'll put this on my to-edit list, unless someone else gets to it first. k.lee 19:36 Oct 20, 2002 (UTC)

What surprised me the most was this line:

'Windows Vista will also be the first version of Windows where the graphics card will be used to draw the desktop'

As opposed to what, a dot-matrix printer? A more correct wording would be 'the 3d engine on the graphics card' or something alone those lines; Windows has been using 2d graphics card acceleration engines for at least half a decade, and of course no version of Windows could display graphics without using the graphics card at all.

NPOV is a good thing. Perhaps you mean POV? --mav

Should be fixed now. Tempshill 23:05, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Is there meant to be any order to the items in this page? They seem to be at random... they're neither in alphabetical nor date order

I went through and attempted to chronologically sort. Tempshill 23:05, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

No mention of NEXTSTEP? // Liftarn

I was going to. I guess I can put some info in now :) Dysprosia 09:24 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can an OS/2 expert revisit the statement that WPS was a "radical departure" and that Windows 95 imitated "much of this"? I find this hard to believe from a user's standpoint. Perhaps the meaning is that it was a radical departure for developers utilizing GUI elements? If from a user's point of view it was really a radical departure, can someone describe what was the departure at least? Tempshill 00:50, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Recent overhaul of Amiga stuff is good, but now feels a little over the top - in the overall scheme of things it is an interesting, but not especially important example, IMO. Also, as it stands there is a lot of POV stuff in there - for example praising the ability to run in "only" 256K - remember, original Mac had half of that, and was also a more complete GUI. GRAHAMUK 11:39, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This article got a mention in the newspaper, The Guardian (London) )January 15, 2004) Pg. 20. Pity they got the URL wrong :) --Imran 16:56, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)

From memory , I *thought* the RISC OS GUI design was heavily borrowed from NeXT STEP (to the point where Acorn called their machines "personal workstations"), Can anyone confirm or deny this? 80.126.238.189 10:52, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Just from looking, they have some similarity, but I wouldn't be swayed to say so. Dysprosia 10:58, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

As the dork who made the massive overhaul on the Amiga entry, I agree it was over the top, though I was also hoping/counting on a 'disinterested party' editing it down to what seemed most novel. (FWIW, while the Amiga was severely limited with 256k... and I was almost going to note the 512k all models were 'instantly' upgraded to, but figured what the hey, the edit sucked already ;) ... don't forget how limited the first Mac was after it loaded the Finder, and it could only support one other process anyway. Far prettier, yes, but how else was it 'more complete?' Then again, I think 'resources' are a mixed blessing.) To me, the 'drawers' are a useless point, but someone else felt them important, so I tried to preserve all that cruft. (I have no idea how or where to tell the tale of the 'usability testing' that went into the palette choice, but it's a good anecdote of what 'usability' engineering really entails... someone else should feel free to research that and wedge it into a more related article, perhaps.) Amiga really comes down to "multitasking" and "multimedia," two human-factors breakthroughs we take for granted today, but people will perpetually argue that "doing multiple things at once" is just a CS problem with no human-factors impact, and "multimedia" means squat, while explaining it as "could do pretty much everything you could do with Win95, ten years earlier" comes off as baiting.

Er, anyhow, I used OS/2 more than I ever did the Amiga, and while the history there is a mess (first versions were 16-bit DOSalikes for the then-new 286s, WPS didn't appear until slightly later, IBM's idea of what it was supposed to be didn't settle until at least 2.0), the 'radical departure' was the inclusion of a proper desktop metaphor, plus the 'templating' that Apple introduced with the Lisa but the Macintosh foreswore. While capitulating to Apple may not have been very innovative, they beat every other x86 "OS" product to the party by a few years; Microsoft was still pushing the Program Manager (only a menu of programs, albeit a pretty drag'n'drop one), Be didn't exist yet, and everything else (GEM, GeoWorks?) still ran atop DOS and didn't, er, 'need' to be a complete OS.

More generally... I'd like to see everyone pay more attention to the issues that shaped our interaction (and, um, the state of the planet) in the legal domain; the GEM lawsuit is quite important, and the Amiga RMB-menu dodge is interesting because it not only kept the stupid platform alive long enough for 'kids' like me to discover and wail about it, but probably played a tangential role in the evolution from static menus to 'context' ones -- IBM 'stole' or independently developed the idea for OS/2 while Apple was still on the war-path, reversing the mouse buttons by default so a right-click selected for drag and a left-click drove a context menu -- and that's the real /history/ of how we stumbled from Point A to Point B.

The Stardock Systems guy provides a little more OS/2 perspective here; don't forget that IBM scared everyone off both by Being IBM and charging ludicrous prices for their development kits... MS were still the 'little' guy, Big Blue was the monopoly du-jour.

-- Anonymous Peon (Fri May 7 09:06:40 UTC 2004)

---

Me again, tried to be less heavy-handed with Windows, still too much information to convey in too small a space. Getting really curious about the way the whole look-and-feel thing... and/or independent design "missteps"... delayed convergence on the unified desktop metaphor... and of course, there's backpressure from the Start-Menu, Taskbar, and Dock crowds now that we did converge on this one GUI Esperanto. (Personally, I consider this an unsolved problem, as you can see when one subset is pleased by 'spatial' desktops, but the other half bemoan the loss of 'browser' interfaces that are more efficient with screen real-estate and allow that little bit of 'CLI' with the path entry field.) ... Anyhow, given that, maybe I can whet someone else's curiosity by noticing it, and beg some fact-checking, editorial consensus, independent insight?

-- Anonymous Peon (Mon May 10 03:11:05 UTC 2004)

--- So, I'm trying to trace the contributions of various organizations in enhancing the GUI. I can't find any definitive references, so please correct me. Here goes:

- SRI: Mouse, bitmapped display, windowing, object selection - Xerox PARC: Overlapping windows, icons, direct manipulation paradigm, desktop metaphor - Apple: gestural interface (click-and-drag)

Who developed contextual (right-click) menus first? I know they were in OS/2; was IBM first? What about WYSIWYG, as it applies to printing?

--Exia

Even before the SRI work, there was the Sketchpad prototype. It was a partial IMP instead of a WIMP. There were only function icons, and no document icons, not even the generic ones which came up at Xerox PARC and even less the true, completely editable document icons which the Mac folks invented. Still, Sketchpad had an impressive light pen as a pointer, and a limited menu capacity. There is much more on it out on the Web, starting with the original thesis. AlainV 02:54, 2004 May 25 (UTC)

Wasn't NExTStep UNIX and X based? I remember the screen being black and white, but X supports monochrom monitors. Did NextStep use X as the underlying window system? Since other window systems were/are X based (KDE, Gnome), shouldn't it be listed earlier in the text.

69.5.156.155(rld)2004 June 17

NeXTSTEP is based on OpenBSD, rather then Unix itself. The GUI/windowing system is not based on X, but on Display PostScript. This is similar to how it remains in Mac OS X, though display postcript is now replaced by a smaller subset known as Quartz, married with PDF as a metafile format. Graham 03:27, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Uhhh, no, NeXTSTEP is based on Mach. However, 3rd party software provided X servers so you could run X apps on NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP. Dysprosia 03:29, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

---

The Agat computer really did not have a graphical user interface - I used one for several years in early 90s and it was all text-based. Although it was an Apple II clone, the UI was not ported over. Curiously, it did have a mouse-like interface but with two separate scrollers for vertical and horisontal movement.

X window System section caption[edit]

I want a vote on this, which do you consider to be the better caption?

"An X-Window Desktop" or "X11 desktop running the fvwm95 window manager."

Which one is more intelligle to you? Which one has more meaning? For the layperson, which has more jargon?

My vote is for "An X-Window Desktop" to be displayed on the thumbnail. I had that as the caption and added "X11 desktop running the FVWM95 window manager" to the fullsize picture but the author of the caption, David Gerard reverted my changes within 2 hours.

I put this here to avoid an edit war. VOTE NOW!

As I said in my edit, your removal violated the policy at Wikipedia:captions. Furthermore, voting is not the first resort you appear to be using it as; it's a last resort if discussion does not reach some sort of rough consensus. As such, calling for a vote is grossly premature.

(The section on X needs a complete rewrite in any case - X has any number of "interfaces", because X is a platform for interfaces rather than an interface itself.) - David Gerard 15:53, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Would you please tell me what "policy" I "violated". Unlike you I consider an edit war to be the last resort.

Speaking of policy I'll highlight this bit from the revert page:

"A revert is the advised action to deal with vandalism. Where you think an older version of a page is better than the current version, a revert is sometimes appropriate. Sometimes, though, it's better to write a third version that takes the best bits of the other two, and combines them to get the best of both worlds. <-------- this is what I did

Note that reverts are not appropriate if a newer version is no better than the older version. You should save reverts for cases where the new version is actively worse.

Regardless, we strongly recommend against heated revert wars. Instead, have a look at our advice on staying cool when the editing gets hot."

The caption as was implies to the reader that this is the X interface. This is simply incorrect; if used in this article, it should say in this article that this just happens to be fvwm95. Sending that off to the image page itself is not a good idea in the context of the article - it's important and relevant so as not to mislead the reader.

That said, as I said, the notion of "an" X11 interface is fallacious, and the section needs a rewrite. Have a look at the illustrations on X11 - three different desktop environments under two different operating systems. (It should probably have twm as well.) Putting those in would make this section a bit less worse - David Gerard 13:44, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I hope you find the time to rewrite the section (or anyone else if they're inclined) I felt strongly about not including the terms (and shouldn't FVWM be in capitals?) because I thought "what's this X11? and what's fvwm95"? I thought some uni student doing unix was trying to show off their knowledge or something. I was originally going to put "An example of an X Window desktop" but thought that was too long and shortened it to "An X Window Desktop". I guess the aim of wikipedia isn't to get hot under the collar so I'll consider my work done.

Focus[edit]

I think the focus of this article is rather strange. It focuses too much on the technical implementation side of the UI's, and not enough on the human interface part of it. The article needs a review by a knowledgeable interface specialist. — David Remahl 12:56, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it lacks such thing such as the crucial role Larry Tesler (who went from Xerox PARC to Apple at that time) played in doing, after hours at Apple, semi-informal usability tests that defined the basis for the early Mac Interface. I think that Tesler's work was at least as important as Raskin's earlier contributions. But what do _you_ think is missing in the human interface part? We can't wait for more knowledgeable persons to come and look over the article. They might never come. We have to start patching it up ourselves. This is why I am asking your opinion on where to begin. Look at it this way: If there is at least a start of an effort at a more balanced view then "knowledgeable interface specialist"s might be more inclined to correct it than if it looked hopeless. --AlainV 16:46, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I know, I know, you can edit this page right now. It's only that I have so many things I need/want to do. I noted the possible omission on the talk page to raise others' awareness of the problem, but I'll also make an effort myself. Perhaps I can even find an expert who's willing to take a look, since I know a few. I've added the page to my (growing) todo list. I didn't have specific suggestions of what to include before. My suggestion was just a general reflection on the style after reading through the article. But, off the top of my head, some things it should include:

The placement of menus, compare different systems, relate to research
Window management, such as windows that collapse to just a title bar in Mac OS, windows that minimize to the task bar in Windows and various virtual display systems in Unix systems.
How icons have evolved
Non-window/menu/icon based GUIs
Scrollbars (proportional, set size)

Perhaps some of these things would fit better in an "evolution of the graphical user interface", with this article being just a quick summary of the different OSes.

— David Remahl 17:38, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This article should discuss IMHO other GUI concepts than the current window-icon-titlebar-startbutton. Remarkable examples are Jeff Raskin's Archy system and Plan9's graphical interface (originating in the Blit terminal). Archy has an infinite-zoom evrything-online interface with instant persistence. Plan9 features a functional minimalism that's incredibly productive compared to other current systems. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.247.247.239 (talk) 14:49, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

X11 & FVWM95? It's a joke?[edit]

X11 & FVWM95? It's a joke? It is pure Windows running WindowMaker in cygwin emulator!!

Comment: What are you talking about? The first versions of X Windows was made around 1984 for UNIX, and thus predates MS Windows by far... As for FVWM95, it's a version of FVWM2 that has been remade to look more like windows. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.225.105.62 (talk) 18:06, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

History of the GUI article on Ars Technica[edit]

Something to compare this page to could be an article just published on the Ars Technica site http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars. I think it's been influeneced a bit by wikipedia (I notice a few screenshots are the same as ones I dug up a while back) - Diceman 11:49, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

Depending how much influence there was from the Wikipedia article at that time, this is a potential problem. I've just referenced the article elsewhere. The "new concept" claim was in the Ars Technica article but appently not in that version of History of the graphical user interface (unless it was removed between the article's initial draft and publication?) Anyway, if this is controversial, please discuss at Talk:Icon bar. Thanks. --Trevj (talk) 12:08, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think this is a real problem. WP:CIRCULAR is a warning against linking to mirror sites and people citing Wikipedia, not about online newspapers with a solid reputation. Ars Technica has a good enough review process so that it can be presumed to have performed fact-checking and count as a reliable source. Diego Moya (talk) 15:03, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. Also thanks for this edit. --Trevj (talk) 15:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Merzouga Wilberts[edit]

Who/what is that? These words are mentioned in the "Xerox Parc" section, but I can't find other references to them using search engines. -- Tuxlover 29 June 2005 17:35 (UTC)

I think it's a joke, or perhaps an experiment intended to disprove the claim that factual errors in Wikipedia articles are quickly corrected. If the latter, the experiment was evidently a success.

In the Windows Vista part[edit]

Aero will also be the first version of Windows where the graphics card will be used to draw the desktop Maybe that should be rephrased in some way? :) Can't come up with anything myself, sorry. --217.157.167.102 13:04, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

GNOME & KDE[edit]

Shouldn't these two GUIs be mentioned here? I'd say they are just as notable as BeOS and OS/2 Warp. Jacoplane 18:55, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree. Also a discussion of other less common X environments under the one that spawned them, like ROX under RISC OS. (Not just any X window manager; only those that have a distinct operating environment.) To the end user they're way more important than what underlying system draws the graphics onto the screen, and god knows trying KDE out for me is about as big a change as running Windows/Mac OS X in terms of what I get. — Felix the Cassowary 23:39, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Patent or ©?[edit]

But this can only be considered a rumor, as all copyrights on windowed GUIs were property of Xerox at that time.

Shouldn't this be patents? Copyrights protect implemetations, patents protect ideas. There's difference. --logixoul 12:40, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Changed it. But unsure whether I'm right. --logixoul (is not watching anymore) 13:43, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

What about HTML?[edit]

Don't HTML-based UI's fit into the picture here somewhere? Sure the early ones were very crude, but then we had applets, flash, DHTML, etc. Now there seems to be a push to rich internet applications that are based on a number of different technologies.

I think that the history is incomplete without some discussion about how the web interface has evolved over the last 12 or so years. Bernfarr 09:07, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree. --logixoul 15:57, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Shouldn't that be another page? it certainly offered nothing new over existing graphical user interfaces and to this day it's much clunkier than even the oldest GUI systems. Lost Goblin 17:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I guess its relevant enough to justify a sentence or two (similar to what you wrote). OTOH I agree that it'd be better on a page on its own. --logixoul 13:07, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I think there might be a logical disconnect between the GUI where Cairo -> GTK+ -> C++ go with program development and Netscape's introduction of the Graphical web browser extended with DOM, Flash, HTML5, and the plug-ins required to run them go with web-page development.Pendare (talk) 13:25, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

The earliest computer graphics were probably baudot 5-bit based, similar to the teletype calendar released each Christmas. HTML itself did not include GUI capability but extended ASCII offered some line and block characters for graphic use. Pendare (talk) 13:25, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Why is Windows Vista separate from Windows?[edit]

Can anyone explain why there are separate sections (that are no co-located) for UIs of the same basic "heritage", such as Windows vs. Windows Vista/Aero, and the various iterations of the Apple interface? It would appear that someone wanted them to be roughly time-sequential, but (IMO) that way lies madness, as after Vista, we'll have a post-Tiger (Panther?) section, etc, etc. It would seem that a historical/modern split, then a creator split would make more sense than the current ad-hoc ordering. -- Gnetwerker 00:53, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, the section reads like advertising. I tried to fix it up some. Per your complaint I'll move it back under "Windows". Ashibaka tock 00:03, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

XGL & AIGLX[edit]

Should AIGLX and XGL be mentioned, or no because they're not very functional yet? — a thing 08:44, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Added[edit]

I added a section in about 3D desktops Metisse/XGL/AIGLX. I didn't want to go into the politics (Vista, etc.) but I wanted to stick to what is currently generally available. I also mentioned DirectFB, which is not but is an interesting technology which probably will be more available in the future.

Probably need expanding and possibly updating with a current state of affairs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Grahamsbrain (talk • contribs) 10:41, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

AmigaOS[edit]

AmigaOS had the capability to run Workbench either in its own window or as a backdrop window (as a full-screen app on the screen, without window decorations) right from the start, with AmigaOS 1.1. This had nothing to do with genlocking and the like.

The above is also incorrect. Starting with 2.0, the user had the option to have disk icons placed in a window rather that directly on the background (the only option in up to 1.3). What the article most likely refers to is the "screen" concept. Intuition allows multiple screens that can be be dragged and moved vertically exposing underlying screens. For example, you could have certain games running full screen, and when you dragged their screen down, it exposed Workbench again. The OS implemented this by switching the video memory pointer on certain raster lines. In any case, all of this has nothing to do with genlocking.

Extensible GUI[edit]

Missing from the various sections is the important topic of extensible GUI technology, such as OpenDoc and OLE Automation. That's a major issue. There is a whole industry based on writing extensions to Microsoft Word, for example -- speech recognition, language translation, etc. Those all work by dynamically modifying the GUI of Word. DonPMitchell 10:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

PLATO[edit]

Missing from this is a kind of great grandfather of GUIs, the PLATO system. Now, I read that you refer to GUIs as windowed environment, that it is multi-tasking, and that one uses a mouse ordinarly. I would argue that each of these things has antecedents in the PLATO system. I would like to offer the page on it in wiki and to point out that you can actually use the legacy code preservation simulation client at www.cyber1.org. No, PLATO is not anything that OS X, Vista, Ubuntu or even the Lisa was, but it was part of the development history. Please see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_System —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.24.41.154 (talk) 22:08, 31 December 2006 (UTC).

Anachronism[edit]

The article states that Windows was modeled on the Mac OS (released in 1984) while early builds and screenshots of Windows were available in 1983. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.241.236.224 (talk) 06:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC).

Microsoft had early access to the Mac, starting circa 1982, IIRC. They were one of the primary developers Apple was courting.

Nuked a para from the Amiga section[edit]

Workbench is also used on the Amiga as a metaphor for their own standard of "desktop" as opposed to others, such as "Macintosh Finder". Workbench itself is another library or process. Rumors said that this concept of modularity was invented by Commodore to treat Workbench as a window amongst the others in the desktop, in order to avoid reprisal from Apple. But this can only be considered a rumor, as all patents on windowed GUIs were property of Xerox at that time.

The first part of this is nonsense, as the Mac Finder was always an actual process (yes, even back in 1984, it was just another process -- one that you could replace if you so choose, and had a better choice...). The Xerox-holds-all-the-patents line is patently untrue. And why talk about a rumor here?

The Amiga section in general seems a little out of control. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.34.156.186 (talk) 21:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC).

References[edit]

How come there are no references in this article? Not even one? Rees11 01:27, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

tthe place where you put all the computer devices.

a place where you store all the virius from the computer.

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Reestructuring of the first level in chapters to help a historic narrative[edit]

I've built on the previous changes to ordering by adding a top level separation in chapters, that IMHO helps to follow the article as a unified "history of GUIs" and not just a collection of historys of individual projects. Hope this enhances the article.Diego 00:09, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

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3D User Interface[edit]

Why aren't Compiz or Beryl mentioned in the '3D User Interface' section, while Windows Vista that's mostly 2.5D is mentioned?

After all, Compiz and Beryl are the first really useful 3D desktops. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.225.105.62 (talk) 18:14, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

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Fair use rationale for Image:Microsoft Windows 1 01 screen.png[edit]

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If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

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Image copyright problem with Image:BeOS Desktop.png[edit]

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Early GUI?[edit]

I think DATAR may have used one of the first GUI's

Matt (talk) 22:38, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Did Engelbart work for Xerox?[edit]

"Short for Graphical User Interface, the GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, and a group of other researchers." When did Engelbart work for Xerox? elgaard (talk) 16:44, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

He didn't. He was at SRI at the time. - Rlw (Talk) 18:16, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, The Mother of All Demos was at SRI International. Disavian (talk) 22:59, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Xerox PARC[edit]

A picture would greatly enhance the section. The best one I can find is http://weather-dimensions.com/tedkaehler/us/ted/resume/st80release-lic2.jpg, but IDK about permissions. Does anyone know of any? Yodaat (talk) 00:27, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

What, no mention of the 3Rivers Computer "PERQ"?[edit]

It was first shown to the public in July, 1980 and first sold commercially in August, 1980, months before the Xerox Star. It was thus the very first computer to be sold commercially with a GUI....For a Wikipedia article on the history of the GUI to not even mention the first Commercial application of the GUI is just ridiculous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.170.135.182 (talk) 18:19, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Skeuomorph?[edit]

I recently learned a neat vocabulary word: skeuomorph! That's when something artificial tries to visually replicate something "real". In the case of the GUI desktop, well, we refer to a desktop, we are trying to replicate or recreate the actions of a desk with a desk calendar, drawers, file folders, etc. It applies to other stuff as well (ie. the false leather grain they mold into the plastic on your car's dashboard, the fake stitches on pieces of artificial leather used on sandals, etc). I will add a link to this in "See also". Acidradio (talk) 22:24, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Xerox Star screenshots[edit]

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8010/index.html

Diego (talk) 10:06, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Apple's contribution[edit]

The first sentence currently says, "Beginning in 1979, started by Steve Jobs and led by Jef Raskin, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple Computer (which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas." That lengthy sentence could be parsed in several ways, but none would be fully accurate. Jef advised the Lisa team in 1979-80; he never led them. He founded the Macintosh project in 1978; he led it until Jobs took the helm in 1981. I'm not sure how to revise the sentence so it's both accurate and relevant.Larry Tesler (talk) 18:42, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

A thought on language usage[edit]

The very first thing a person sees in this article is a tribute to William Gates. How so? By the use of the term "Graphical" in the title. Bill was the first person to use this obdurate and uneducated form of the word for describing his *graphic* (IE: containing pictorial elements) interface. This type of misuse now has permeated the English language, and we now have such things as historical events, mathematical equations, technological advances, magical tricks, quadratical equations, psychical studies, and similar language atrocities. A few days ago I ran across an article where a college professor wrote about bubonical plague infesting several Pacifical islands. Just because a word ends in the letter C does not mean a person has to add the -al suffix. I don't care what Uncle Billy says, it's a *graphic* interface, folks. Please modify the entire article to use the term correctly. Thanks - John Fairbairn - Rush Creek Research Company 67.233.240.168 (talk) 08:55, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Apple GUI pictures are not accurate with regards to noteworthiness[edit]

The article should have photos showing the Lisa GUI on top and the Mac GUI below.

The IIgs is not noteworthy enough and the Lisa is the most noteworthy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.33.93.239 (talk) 09:22, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

This article is really incomplete[edit]

I mean, come on. An article about the history of the GUI and no mention of SmallTalk (the language and environment that gave birth to the GUI) or Windows 3.x (the first GUI environment to be a major commercial success)? - 200.82.96.168 (talk) 07:02, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

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Wrong or at least misleading text in section Xerox Parc[edit]

"The GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Dan Ingalls, David Smith, Clarence Ellis and a number of other researchers." Not completely wrong, but pretty much misses the truth. Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Lampson and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(software) which are more accurate. Provable fact is, that the first graphical user interface on the Alto was written by Lampson and his colleagues in BCPL, not by the mentioned people and not in Smalltalk. You can even have a look at the Alto source code here: http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html. The first WYSIWIG text editor Bravo written by Lampson and Simonyi was the basis for the first DTP application Gipsy written by Tesler and Mott (see links). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.202.183.35 (talk) 23:18, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

"Current Trends" needs to be greatly expanded and a new section for GUI history post-2000 needs to be added[edit]

Despite the article going greatly in depth on the history of various early GUIs from the 80's, the history of modern GUIs that are still in use today are awkwardly slotted in as a sentence or two in the section talking about the 90's, in the same space talking about obsolete OS's such as NextSTEP, OS/2, Amiga Workbench etc. I understand that many of those OS's have modern day derivatives and reimplementations, but the article should really have a section post-2000s that talks about the consolidation of the OS marketplace into the Windows, MacOS, and Linux & more recently Chrome OS world we have today in the desktop space, how those various GUIs have evolved since then, alongside the emergence of smartphones and tablets with their Post-WIMP interfaces, how they differ from mouse-based UIs and how they've effected on the development of traditional desktop GUIs (for example Windows 8, GNOME 3, various iOS-style interfaces introduced to MacOS, etc). Like many Wikipedia articles on computing history, it seams like history ends around the mid-2000s, which I'm guessing is when these articles were last updated in a substantial form. It wasn't long ago that Wikipedia still talked about PDAs in the present tense.

The "Current Trends" section needs to be expanded greatly - at the moment there's just a tiny paragraph on smartphones and tablets which is especially jarring considering their impact on society and the fact that they're the primary computing device for many people now. In fact, are Mobile Device GUIs really a "current trend" when we're now a more then a decade out from the first iPhone and Android devices? Or that that class of GUIs owe much of their inspiration from earlier mobile devices such as PDAs like the Apple Newton, Windows Mobile/CE and Palm going back into the early 90's, something which isn't even mentioned once?

Then a much larger paragraph on "3D user interfaces" which is confusingly worded to refer to both 3D GUI prototypes such as BumpTop (which was discontinued a decade ago and largely never went anywhere) and modern GPU accelerated GUIs which relegate that power largely for some graphical effects such as drop shadows and window blur rather then substantial changes in UI paradigm. Then a few sentences on "Notebook Interfaces" which doesn't really state it's relevance to the history of GUI development as a whole, especially in a article largely talking about OS-level interfaces rather then application interfaces. On that note - should this article make reference to application UI design? And the web, where does that fit in with GUI history, especially in relation to web apps?

And a small paragraph on virtual reality that doesn't even make reference to VR-centric GUIs, on an article about graphical user interfaces? Nor any mention of AR or Mixed Reality, such as the work Microsoft is doing with Hololens, Google Glass, mobile device AR from various developers and device manufacturers etc. 82.15.131.45 (talk) 14:42, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Monday, July 5, 2021