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GUI Graphics Software

A History of Every GUI Ever 355

Posted by Hemos from the walking-through-history dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I stumbled upon this site - GUIdebook, that offers a history of every GUI, from command prompts, to GEOS for the commodore 64, through Mac OSX. It's an interesting stroll down memory lane."
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A History of Every GUI Ever More

A History of Every GUI Ever

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  • Nice... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:03AM (#8645375)
    TOS was so kick ass... 15 years ago...

    • Re:Nice... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Doogly ( 691769 )
      Actually, TOS was the kernal....GEM was the GUI. I loved my GEM 520ST Black and White. The mushy, crunchy square keys on the keyboard....wow!

      • Re:Nice... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by hattig ( 47930 )
        I think that the Atari ST had nice styling for the time (it looked nicer than the A500 for example). Shame about the innards though. And these are what counted in the end.

    • Re:Nice... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kabdib ( 81955 )
      Nah, TOS sucked. (I was on the team that shipped it. TOS *definitely* sucked, even 15 years ago).
      • It may have sucked, but did have one big advantage - it could read regular old DOS 3.5 inch floppys (unlike the mac out of the box) AND had a GUI.
      • "Nah, TOS sucked. (I was on the team that shipped it. TOS *definitely* sucked, even 15 years ago)."

        Kabdib, please clarify. Were you a member of the Atari Corp. team or a contracted employee at Digital Research at the time?

        And if you were an employee of Atari Corp. (which I believe you were), did any of the Digital Research folk (and some had been former Atari, Inc. employees) ever casually mention that Atari, Inc. had developed more powerful computers (the Gaza and Phoenix) based upon the 68000 (I believ

        • Re:Nice... (Score:3, Informative)

          by gklinger ( 571901 )
          Yeah, he worked for Atari but I'm not going to give his real name as he has chosen not to do so. Any boy detective can find it if they make the slightest effort. I'll even give you a clue. He wrote Super Pac-Man for the Atari 5200 before going on to operating systems. He's mentioned in this article [atarimagazines.com] too. Sadly, he's right about TOS, or TOS-off as we disaffectionatelly called it. It sucked. Oh how I wish the Atari ST had shipped with OS 9 [wisc.edu]. If it had, I might still have my hair.

          I've been meaning to thank him

    • I loved how fast TOS booted up from Rom :)

      I bought my Atari in 1985 (maybe it sucked 15 years ago, but 20 years ago it was great ;) solely because they were playing Sundog in the computer store - and dammit - I needed to play that game!

      Still remember the FTL logo in Sundog coming up with a "swooshing" sound that scared the shit out of me - thought the computer was going to explode!! Up till that time I had only heard "beeps" out of computers.

  • Scroll down memory lane (Score:5, Funny)

    by robolemon ( 575275 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {yztren}> on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:03AM (#8645378) Homepage
    Or an interesting scroll down memory lane more like it!

  • http://www.oldos.org/ (Score:5, Informative)

    by jmays ( 450770 ) * on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:04AM (#8645384)
    Don't forget about Old OS [oldos.org]. Also an interesting site!

    Includes the tragedy that is Microsoft BOB!
  • I guess I'll be using the command line today.

  • Good 'ole days (Score:5, Funny)

    by maximilln ( 654768 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:06AM (#8645413) Homepage Journal
    Finally, a /. article which doesn't immediately remind me of pyramid schemes, political graft, the extortion of the American people by their corporate executive overlords... (though all of these things combined contributed to the death of Commodore and the rise of the x86 architecture).

    Crap. And the site is /.'ed.
    • Linux Torvalds's autobiography is a great look into the past too. Funny how a lot of what he did early on is the same type of stuff that many of us did. He just took it a step further :)

    • Seriously... (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by bonch ( 38532 )
      Slashdot's not as fun as it used to be. Now it has an agenda to push, for "your rights online."

      Used to just be an excellent place for tech news and fun articles like this. Now we have to sit through MP3 piracy justifications, DRM rants, anti-"M$" bullshit, GPL-dissertations (boooooring), etc.

      • Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @01:00PM (#8646952) Homepage Journal
        Linux and the Free software community has grown to achieve business acceptance. /. is like MTV, except the people who actually brought Linux to the corporate world don't realize that they're too old to keep coming back.

        MTV doesn't have a single show aimed at 30 somethings (let alone 40ish and 50ish) so I can delete the channel from my favorites list. I can't quite do that with our beloved /. yet. Yet.

  • what? (Score:5, Funny)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:06AM (#8645421)
    text interface counts as graphic interface?

    as opposed to what... tactile interface?

    • Re:what? (Score:2, Informative)

      by J. Jacques ( 708438 )
      If it's displayed on a screen, couldn't it technically be called "graphical"?

      • Re:what? (Score:3, Informative)

        by WormholeFiend ( 674934 )
        well, historically (which is the point here), the term "Graphic User Interface" served to describe the Mac and Windows mouse-icon-menu way of shielding users from internal computer processes and make the system easier to use than the command-line interface.

      • Re:what? (Score:5, Informative)

        by RetroGeek ( 206522 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:12AM (#8645503) Homepage
        couldn't it technically be called "graphical"

        Let's not start re-inventing technical meanings. Graphical is not Text.

        A text system cannot by definition display graphics. The original IBM had two basic modes for the display, text and graphics. You had to switch them within your program. Text was MUCH faster, so you only went to graphical when you had to. It was also easier to code to the text mode.

        • Three ways to do graphics in text mode (Score:5, Informative)

          by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:24AM (#8645655) Homepage Journal

          A text system cannot by definition display graphics.

          Redefinable font lets you display graphics in text mode. The Defrag utility in MS-DOS 6.22 used this.

          The PC's codepages have a glyph consisting of the top half on and the bottom half off. Set each character cell's "on color" to one color and the "off color" to another and you can display graphics in text mode. Lots of ANSI BBS screens used this, and some business software packages used this for bar graphs and the like.

          And now the most from-left-field solution: Reprogramming the text generator to show four scanlines per row of glyphs rather than 16 (assuming VGA) lets you use the glyph with the left half on and the right half off for a 160x100 pixel 16 color video mode. Tunneler, an old DOS game, used this.

        • Re:what? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Minna Kirai ( 624281 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:30AM (#8645717)
          Let's not start re-inventing technical meanings.

          It's not a reinvention, though. The word usage in the computer user-interface field has always been at odds with the English language. But computers became so popular that they've wiped-out the original meaning.

          Graphical is not Text.

          That's exactly what the word means, though. In fact to be pedantically correct, a photograph or diagram isn't graphical. Only written text is by-definition "graphic".

          Use your dictionary [reference.com]: the very first definition listed is "Of or relating to a written representation". That's the oldest meaning of the word; the others are neologisms by comparison.

          To be linguistically correct, modern computers would be said to employ PUIs (Pictoral User Interfaces)
          • the problem is that your (probably correct) linguistic definitions precisely contradict (perhaps defacto-) standard definitions in computer terms. the statement that graphic is not text is entirely correct in this field as most people would agree. based on exact definitions from a dictionary, this is apparently not correct. however, even tho the computer standard is apparently incorrect, i think it is a justified statement that your parent poster suggested it was a re-inventing of technical meanings in t

          • Use your dictionary: the very first definition listed is "Of or relating to a written representation".

            That depends on which dictionary you reference. The particular definition that you cite from that link is from American Heritage; further down the page the Webster's first definition of the word "graphical" is "Of or pertaining to the arts of painting and drawing." A true pedant consults the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), whose first definition for the word graphical is "Clearly traced," and is nonspe

        • ancient Commodore video hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Sloppy ( 14984 ) * on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @12:33PM (#8646594) Homepage Journal
          A text system cannot by definition display graphics.
          (Just to be pedantic... Actually, not really trying to 'correct' anything you said; I just wanna show off what an old geezer I am.)

          Tell that to VIC20 programmers. Unlike the C64, the VIC20 didn't have a graphics mode. But you could display a 16x16 grid showing the whole character set, and then tell the video hardware to look up the character definitions somewhere in RAM instead of using the ROM. This effectively gave you a 128 pixel by 128 pixel bitmap display, on a "text-only" system.

          ... and we liked it! (Well, ok, not really.)

          Oh, and speaking of the fact that text mode is faster than graphics, there was a "joke" later in the mid 80s, having to do with that. If you wrote a BASIC program on the C64 that, say, computed and printed the first 100 prime numbers, and then did the same thing on the Amiga, the C64 was faster. People would say, "Huh? How can that be? The Amiga's blazing 7 MHz 16-bit 68000 runs rings around the 6510!" But then you'd do it, and the C64 would really win. It had nothing to do with the how fast the processors could compute primes, though. It was just that the C64 could copy 2k of RAM (the amount of work to "scroll" the text display) faster than the Amiga blitter could copy several hundred k to "scroll" a graphic display. (The Amiga didn't have a text mode. ;-)

          • Or even the BBC Micro (Score:3, Interesting)

            by rklrkl ( 554527 )
            The BBC Micro of the 80's (made by Acorn) had a "Mode 7" teletext mode which would give you not only a chunky colour TRS-80-style block graphics, but only used 1K (40 column by 25 lines) of memory mapped characters (at hex 7C00 if my "memory" serves me right). This meant you could refresh the entire screen of text in 6502 assembly code in a few milliseconds (it had a 2Mhz 6502 processor) and the scrolling speed was also phenomenal (I called it "the fruit machine effect"!) - probably still faster than any ot

      • Re:what? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Dreadlord ( 671979 )
        Nope, there is a difference, a good discussion of the differences between text and graphical interfaces can be found here [spack.org].
      • Shouldn't it be called a "planet"?
      • If it's displayed on a screen, couldn't it technically be called "graphical"?

        Then what do you call Twin [freshmeat.net]?

      • Re:what? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Malor ( 3658 ) * on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:59AM (#8646119) Journal
        The advent of bitmap graphics at all was a big deal. In text mode, the smallest addressable unit is 'one character'. This means that an 80x24 screen takes 1920 bytes to represent. Processors are so fast these days that you could update that screen, sheesh, a hundred thousand times a second, probably. But in the days of kilohertz machines, that was quite a bit of data to push.

        The early 8-bit home computers could do bitmap graphics, and in fact it was a big selling point.... "Game XYZ, fight monsters in actual bitmap graphics!' Check out Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple 2 emulators for an idea of what 'good graphics' once meant. I don't remember the resolution of those early screens anymore, but it was very low... certainly not higher than 320x200.

        When the Mac shipped, computers really changed. Instead of a text OS with occasional, fully-focused graphical programs, the machine was so incredibly powerful (8mhz, 16 bit) that it could do graphics all the time...they could actually draw a user interface on a 512x384 screen and have time left over. That's 196,608 pixels. I don't know how many bits per pixel the first Mac used... I keep wanting to say "one", but I think I remember grays on those first Macs, so that might be wrong. If it WAS one bit per pixel, they could represent that screen in about 24k. That's still a lot of data to push around, compared with the 2k for a text screen, and could be as high as 196K if it was 8 bits/pixel. I'm pretty sure it wasn't that high... the first Mac had only 128k of RAM. Maybe it was just black/white.

        They actually managed to get a fairly good GUI up on the 1Mhz C64 with GEOS, but it was the Mac that first showed the mainstream that it was even possible.

        Everything after that has been about accelerating that basic idea. For a long time, neither the Mac nor the PC was really fast enough to animate the whole screen at once at a reasonable framerate. Games had to be very clever to work around this; even though they'd done a GUI on the 64, it was still very, very hard to animate a full screen on a PC. As I recall, that was mostly due to bus speed; the system simply couldn't shovel enough bits out to the graphics card over an ISA bus. The processor was more than capable, but the bus just wasn't up to it.

        For the last 15 years, the whole evolution of computers has been about making graphics go faster. First there were Windows (2D) accelerators, then full motion video, which flopped as a concept, because it didn't make good games and didn't work very well. A number of years ago, we finally got to the point that pretty much every computer in the world can do very smooth full motion video, and nobody even noticed, the idea was that dead. Then 3D accelerators, then GPUs, then hardware T&L.... the driving force in PC development has been graphics.

        Sometime in the last couple of years, PCs really hit a plateau; they've gotten fast enough to do practically anything we can think of, at least for now. We can generate, manipulate, and output graphics of unbelievable quality... and we're mostly pretty blase' about the whole thing.

        I'll tell you, though, if I showed my desktop machine (Athlon 2800+, GeForce FX5950, dual 36gb Raptors in RAID-0, Audigy 2 Platinum, Klipsch 5.1 speakers) to my 15-year-old self, I'd fear for my life. In 1985, I'd have killed someone with a big smile on my face to own a machine like that.

        Phew, I kinda went off on a tangent there. Getting back on track..... GUI means a very specific thing. If the OS can turn individual dots on and off, and draws the user interface that way, it's a GUI.

      • Re:what? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mdielmann ( 514750 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @12:07PM (#8646234) Homepage Journal
        If it's displayed on a screen, couldn't it technically be called "graphical"?

        So a hardcopy of Playboy isn't graphical? Let me guess, you read the articles...

    • GUI is graphics, CHUI is text (Score:5, Informative)

      by kherr ( 602366 ) <kevin&puppethead,com> on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:21AM (#8645614) Homepage
      CHUI stands for CHaracter User Interface. Pronounced "chew-ee". I like the term for text-based interfaces, as a counterpart to the GUI. A CLI is a command-line interface, which is really somewhat different from a CHUI. Remember all those DOS apps with text-based windows and menus? Curses and Vermont Views are good examples of CHUI libraries.
    • Sure. What about punched-cards? Nothing graphical about that. As long as it's displayed on a TTY (glass TELETYPE), it could count. Plus, all that goofy ASCI art could qualify...

  • Yes well done /. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fisher99 ( 580290 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:06AM (#8645425)
    that website is definately a memory NOW! Funny though I started with fvwm wayback, went through windows UI, CDE, kde, gnome and I'm back with fvwm2 as my main GUI.
    • Google [216.239.51.104] Link

    • Re:Yes well done /. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nickos ( 91443 )
      I figure there's more open source window managers for X Windows then there are proprietary GUIs, and it's a shame that GUIdebook doesn't cover them. There's a good site here [gilesorr.com] that does.

      Unlike proprietary GUIs, some of the open source offerings are more innovative. I particularly like Ion [cs.tut.fi], a tiled wm, and WindowLab [nickgravgaard.com], which seems pretty original.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by haxor.dk ( 463614 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:07AM (#8645427) Homepage
    .... the internet backbone in European country Poland broke down today following a phenomenon known as "The slashdot effect". No people were harmed in the incident, but a lot of Slavic IT professionals were terribly inconvenienced.

  • Slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)

    by LGagnon ( 762015 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:07AM (#8645432)
    Here's the Google cache [216.239.51.104].

  • Correction? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mishehu ( 712452 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:08AM (#8645447)
    Shouldn't this be about the history of every UI, not GUI? CLI doesn't normally incorporate graphics. ;-)

    • Re:Correction? (Score:2, Funny)

      by dkh2 ( 29130 )
      On top of that, it's not a walk down Memory Lane. It's a walk down GUI Lane.

      A walk down Memory Lane would detail the history of [something]RAM and its precursors.

    • TUIs, ASCII art (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      You can definately make graphic interfaces in text mode. If you ask a completely non-computer person if that's a GUI, he'll probably think so. As opposed to what? A verbal interface a la Star Trek?

      The CLI is simply the most minimalist GUI you can have on your screen. The whole GUI concept as used in computing was like "as opposed to text-based", but it doesn't really change the fact that "text" is nothing but a simple form of graphics.

      Kjella

  • Great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lemonhed ( 412041 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:08AM (#8645449) Journal
    The work by Engelbart (from PARC) directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. Several people went from SRI to Xerox PARC in the early 1970's (where I worked).

    The Xerox PARC team codified the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointers) paradigm, first pioneered on the Xerox Alto experimental computer, but which eventually appeared commercially in the Xerox 8010 ('Star') system in 1981
  • Too bad the sight was /.'ed so fast. I really wanted to read it. But my browser is sitting there forver....like GI Joe loading up on my old C64.

  • Another GUIde! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Krik Johnson ( 764568 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:10AM (#8645467) Homepage
    Since this site is slashdotted, there is another GUide that I know about, which is also interesting.

    Nathan's GUI gallery [toastytech.com]. It has every version of windows, many macs, Unixes, plain wierd ones and of course the infamous Microsoft Bob. The IE is evil section is hilarious as well!

  • Hey -Editors! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erasmus ( 32516 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:10AM (#8645470)
    Shouldn't Slashdot's editors make at least a token effort to see if the pages they link to can stand the traffic they invariably direct to them?
    Is a quick email to a webmaster really such an astoundingly difficult task or is effectively DoSing every interesting small webpage on the Internet the goal?

    • Re:Hey -Editors! (Score:5, Funny)

      by geoffspear ( 692508 ) * on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:19AM (#8645580) Homepage
      Hey, be quiet... you're going to ruin my best excuse for not having anything remotely interesting on my webpage!

    • Re:Hey -Editors! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by PhuckH34D ( 743521 )
      they dont do that.
      Read the FAQ [slashdot.org]
      ( and while your at it, this [slashdot.org] is the "coolest story Slashdot's ever had")
      • Yes, and Denial is a river in Egypt.

        I have always considered this aspect of /. to be one huge cop-out. Not only does it affect the people whose sites are linked to, it also affects us people who want to actually see the site that goes with the story.

        Slashdot .. All action .. no responsibility.
        • it also affects us people who want to actually see the site

          Right on. That's one causal factor for the unceasing series of /. posters who comment before reading the article- they're trying to be responsible and not hammer a crippled website.

          The FAQ answer alludes to "implications". Well so what? There might be problems, so take 'em on! That answer is four years old. There's been enough time to "think it through in detail". None of the problems look insurmountable.

          It would be fairly easy to script

    • Shouldn't Slashdot's editors make at least a token effort ...

      This doesn't occur for much the same reason people are often jerks in traffic and don't give someone room to enter their lane. Despite the fact it would take a measly 5 seconds out of their precious day, they'd rather hog the lane and not let you in. The reason being, of course, that since nobody makes them exercise that courtesy, they generally will not. And so it is with Slashdot...

      • This doesn't occur for much the same reason people are often jerks in traffic and don't give someone room to enter their lane.

        Perhaps if people would try manipulating that funny stalk poking out of the steering column called a "blinker," then I'd consider letting them over. If they're too lazy to put on a blinker, they can try to get in front of someone else. I certainly don't want them in front of me.

    • Re:Hey -Editors! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 ) *
      Even without caching/mirroring, they could still make the Slashdot Effect less spikey.

      A story about old GUIs is hardly "breaking news." It's not like "Oh shit, the missiles are on the way and everyone has 10 minutes to read this story about how the nuclear holocaust started." (Heh, I can imagine Slashdot addicts trying to load the page instead of ducking and covering. (Then someone posts, "Is this really news for nerds?"))

      Not everyone needs to see this type of article at once. For non-news articles

  • Kind of telling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:10AM (#8645476)
    Don't you think it's kind of telling that GUIs have required so many iterations and versions and still people havent managed to learn how to use a computer properly, they're still difficult to use and still people end up not being able to get them to do what they want.

    Yet the terminal console is almost unchanged in 30 years. Hmmmm?
    • Don't you think it's kind of telling that GUIs have required so many iterations and versions and still people havent managed to learn how to use a computer properly, they're still difficult to use and still people end up not being able to get them to do what they want.

      Yet the terminal console is almost unchanged in 30 years. Hmmmm?

      Actually, I find it more telling that most people haven't learned how to use a terminal console properly. They're still difficult to use and people end up not being able to get

  • Oh.. "GUI" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mateito ( 746185 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:10AM (#8645482) Homepage
    I prefer a Gooey [wtvn.com]

  • GEOS- Oh the memories (Score:3, Funny)

    by Perrin7 ( 671365 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:11AM (#8645492)
    On my old C128 (I was sure it was going to be the greatest thing when I sold my C64) I had GEOS and thought the graphical waste basket was neat ... until I dropped an essay in it and then panicked. That lead me to the discovery the the SECOND time you write and essay you get much better results. But GEOS was still my first encounter with a graphical operating environment.
    • One night, I dropped my essay into the wastebasket, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the whole essay just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good essay!

  • GEOS.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plams ( 744927 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:12AM (#8645496) Homepage

    I remember GEOS - it was actually a nice little Mac-style OS for C64. It's funny to see a complete package, with "paint", "wordpad" and so on run in less than 64k of memory.

    HOTU has a PC version of it. [the-underdogs.org]

    • PC Geos is STILL for sale, it's bundled with a word processor which is OK. Geos' big lack is that it has no facility for networking. It does support file sharing sort of, you have to use DOS drivers, and then it can handle non-disk disks. GEOS on PC uses DOS for file access, but does everything else itself. They used GEOS for the Tandy/Casio/GRiD Zoomer/Z-PDA 7000/GRiDPad 2390, and for the "PALMConnect" software which you used on the PC to transfer data to and from the PDA - Incidentally this was Palm Compu
  • Oh it's already gone.

    Slashdot could do everyone us a favour by putting a mirror of the article/site on its own server temportarily just in case the inevitable happens.
  • Now there is a blast from the past. I have fond memories of using GeoWorks Ensemble while in graduate school. I was forced to pickup a used RadioShack B&W 286 laptop in order to attend a computer class. The class was full but they allowed a few additional students to sign in if they had laptops. So I had a copy of GeoWorks and I cranked out a ton of term papers with it. It was a pretty nifty program for it's time. It ran very quickly on that 286.

  • Missing option (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:24AM (#8645652)
    I use punchcards you insensitive clod!
  • It's too bad the site is slashdotted. I wonder if they have one of my personal favourites, SPF (which was also called ISPF at some point in its lifetime). I kept my box of cards with my personalized SPF screens for years after I left the mainframe world in case I went back.
  • Anyone remember the windows manager called "Multi-Vue" for the Tandy Color Computer 3?

  • 1 Q & 1 Obs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:34AM (#8645772)
    Q: so exactly which of those historical OSs hosting this just got quick-fried?

    Obs: I saw Doug Englebart a few years ago giving a large group presentation - he had the best interface I'd ever seen for a presentation - the current slide was displayed in a frame of thumbnails of the slides in the entire presentation - so you had random access to the whole show, you could see the flow, he could jump and reference other slides if needed without the typical bambi-on-ice powerpoint shuffle.

    Oh yeah, the presentation was great, too - the analogy of introducing GUIs to telling horse riders how it was going to be driving cars, ("I have to lookk in a mirror to go the other way? I can't even shave in a mirror without hurting myself...") was original, funny and insightful.

  • The joys of proportionally spaced fonts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:36AM (#8645793)

    I really miss the days when screens were created from proportionally spaced fonts. When you would draw boxes on the screen with special table drawing fonts or by changing the background and foreground colours ("teletex style"). You very rarely see that these days, which is a real shame because not only is it very efficient and simple from a programming point of view, but a well designed screen in that style can be very pleasing on the eye.

    It's a shame that the only proportionally spaced web font accessible to designers is courier, which sucks. Lucida Console is nicer but not available on all systems.

    Anyone know of any web sites designed with proportionally spaced fonts?

  • BitTorrent For Websites (Score:4, Interesting)

    by technix4beos ( 471838 ) <cshaiku@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:48AM (#8645941) Homepage Journal
    Why isnt this being done?

    A simple wget -m http://www.somesite.com, gzip, create a torrent, and share the .torrent file.

  • In the Beginning was the Command Line (Score:4, Informative)

    by ShinyBrowncoat ( 692095 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:48AM (#8645951) Homepage
    I also recommend Neal Stephenson's excellent essay on the topic of GUIs, In the Beginning was the Command Line [cryptonomicon.com]
  • A command prompt isn't graphical and therefore not a GUI. Sure it's a user interface, but not a graphical one. Maybe the book should have been named UIdebook.

  • Quotes... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AyeRoxor! ( 471669 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @11:59AM (#8646114) Journal
    Found these the other day on the PC Magazine website:

    • "The introduction of OS/2 1.0 marks the start of an exciting time for the PC and PC applications. The 'OS/2 decade' has begun."
      • Charles Petzold, contributing editor, in "OS/2: A New Beginning for PC Applications," PC Magazine April 12, 1988.

    • "A funny thing's happening on the road to OS/2. Microsoft Windows has turned into the dazzling multitasking operating system that OS/2 is still struggling to become."
      • Gus Venditto, executive editor, reviewing the brand-spanking-new Microsoft Windows 3.0, First Looks, PC Magazine July 1990.


    /not trying to start a flamewar, just fascinating quotes...
  • I don't see etcb-a-sketch in there.
  • While not an OS, there was a nice GUI with the original 286 IBM PS/1. It was split into 4 quadrants, it took you to a file explorer (I think it was Dos 4.0's explorer), a configurable list of programs, and I can't remember what the other 2 did. It was in gorgeous 256 colors when everything was still EGA. King's Quest 5 came out shortly after I got it, and though it ran like ass on a 10mhz 286, it looked awesome at the time. The entire PS/1 gui was stored on drive D:, which was a small (1M) ROM drive.
  • The notice in a web browser

    "The page cannot be displayed"

    signifying that the site has already been slashdotted.

  • Geos (Score:2, Funny)

    by Phanatik ( 696510 )
    I loved Geos! Never had any problems like Win3.0 and 3.1 had.
  • I've gone back to my General Automation SPC-16/45 with its incandescent lamps for output and toggle switches for input. No pop-ups ever.
  • Also Atari's GEM as was noted previously.

    The site apparently completely misses pen computing oriented UIs though.

    No PenPoint, PenRight, Newton, Palm, WinCE

    Rather a shame that, especially given that some pen programs have been _very_ innovative / influential.

    FutureWave SmartSketch gave us Flash

    Newton provides Mac OS X w/ InkWell

    Go getting buried gave MS room for Windows for Pen Computing, and Taiwan a stick to beat them up w/ for licensing (Taiwan's MITI bought PenPoint)

    Also misses HP's NewWave, which

  • A pile of UNIX GUI's missing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stox ( 131684 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2004 @01:57PM (#8647638) Homepage
    Off the top of my head:

    Sun: Sunview, and NeWS

    AT&T: BLIT, DMD5620. DMD620, DMD630, DMD730, UnixPC/3B1

    DEC: DECwindows/Motif

    And I am sure there are many more that I have forgotten.

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