History of the graphical user interface
Brief History
The graphical user interface, or GUI, of Microsoft Windows is based on that of the MacOS (and Apple's earlier unsuccessful Lisa), which in turn used many elements of the work of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), who produced the advanced but commercially unsuccessful Star and Alto computers. The Star's user interface, with visual icons representing computer resources, built upon the work of Doug Engelbart's team at SRI, who developed the first computers with a device called a mouse used to move a pointer on a graphic display.
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, Doug Engelbart's On-Line System, Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson
Expanded History
Initial Developments
The first concept of a windowing system begins with the first real-time graphic display systems for computers, namely the SAGE Project and Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad.
Augmentation of Human Intellect
Doug Engelbart's Augmentation of Human Intellect project at SRI in the 1960's developed the On-Line System, which incorporated a mouse-driven cursor and multiple windows.
Xerox PARC
Engelbart's work directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. Several people went from his project to Xerox PARC in the early 1970's, most importantly Bill English, Engelbart's senior engineer. The Xerox PARC team codified the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointers) paradigm, which appeared commercially in the Xerox 8010 ('Star') system in 1981.
Apple Macintosh
Beginning in 1980(?), led by Jef Raskin, the Macintosh team at Apple Computer (which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas in the first commercially successful product to use a GUI, the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984.
In 2001 Apple introduced Mac OS X ( roman numeral 10).
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft modeled the
first version of Windows, released in 1985, on the MacOS. Windows was a GUI (graphic user
interface) for their own operating system (MS-DOS) that had been shipped
with IBM PC and compatible computers since 1981. Apple
sued Microsoft over infringement of the look-and-feel of the MacOS. The court case would run
for many years.
On August 6, 1997, after 18 months of losses by Apple, Microsoft
helped 'bail' them out of serious financial trouble by buying 100,000
non-voting shares in the company for $150 million. Microsoft had several
political reasons for doing this, but one condition was that Apple had to
drop this long-running court case.
It is generally acknowledged that Microsoft has advanced the science of human-computer interaction and the technology of user interfaces minimally. However, the sheer volume of Microsoft Windows
systems installed (90% in the 1990s) has tended to make it the reference standard
to which all others are compared.
See Microsoft Windows/History.
GEM
At the same time Microsoft was developing Windows in the 1980s, Digital Research developed
the GEM Desktop GUI system. GEM was created as an alternative window system to run on
IBM PC systems, either on top of MS-DOS (like Microsoft Windows) or on top of CPM-86, DR's
own operating system that MS-DOS was patterened after. GEM achieved minimal success in the
PC world, but was later used as the native GUI on the Atari ST machines.
GEOS
GEOS was another very early graphical desktop system. Originally written for the 8 bit home computer Commodore 64 it was later ported to IBM PC systems.
It came with several application programs like a calendar and word processor. Compared to the competing Windows 3.0 GUI it could run reasonably well on much simpler hardware, perhaps due to the fact that the GEOS programmers learned to use highly optimised assembly code while designing GEOS for the very resource limited Commodore 64.
OS/2
IBM's planned successor for Windows 3.0. First implementations came without a GUI.
BEOS
Originally developed as a replacement GUI for the apple Macintosh, later ported to the IBM-PC. Used a modified BSD unix kernal , but did not use X-windows but a wriiten from scratch GUI. Much effort was spent by the developers to make it an efficient platform for multimedia applications.
X Window
The standard windowing system in the Unix world, developed in the
late 1980s, is the 'X Window System'. This was developed at MIT for use on graphics
workstations in Project Athena. Due largely to the availability of the source code used
to write it, it has become the standard graphical interface on most Unix
based systems - including most GNU/Linux distributions.
In the early days of X Window development,
Sun Microsystems and AT&T attempted to push for a GUI standard called OpenLook
in competition with MOTIF. OpenLook was a well designed standard developed from
scratch while MOTIF was a collective effort that fell into place. Many people
who worked on OpenLook at the time appreciate its consistent design. It was like
comparing Microsoft Windows and Macintosh GUI in the early days.
It was two giants against the rest of the industry. Motif won the 'religious'
war and it later turned into CDE.
In the late 1990s, there was significant growth in the
Unix world, especially among the open source community.
New graphical desktop movements grew up around
GNU/Linux and similar operating systems, based
on X Windows. A new emphasis on providing an integrated and uniform
interface to the user brought about two new desktop
See Graphical user interface, History of computing.