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The History of User Interfaces

history.user-interface.io

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Re: The History of User Interfaces

#11

Post by SeanLuke »

linguae wrote: post #5

This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection ( http://toastytech.com/guis/ ), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs. Some feedback: 1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs…

I was dumbfounded to find NeXTSTEP missing: it was among the very most influential GUIs in history. Much of 95's UI (and OS/2's UI) were stolen directly from it, and badly, right down to icons.

This page also seems to focus not on UIs, not on GUIs, but just on GUIs for personal computers. No discussion of the tablet->PDA->phone->small device UI evolution at all, even though that UI route has now had profound impact even on laptops. Where's the Newton?

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#12

Post by eesmith »

SeanLuke wrote: post #11
linguae wrote: post #5

This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection ( http://toastytech.com/guis/ ), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs. Some feedback: 1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs…

I was dumbfounded to find NeXTSTEP missing: it was among the very most influential GUIs in history. Much of 95's UI (and OS/2's UI) were stolen directly from it, and badly, right down to icons. This page also seems to focus not on UIs, not on GUIs, but just on GUIs for personal computers. No discussion of the tablet->PDA->phone->small device UI evolution at all, even though that UI route has now had profound impact e…

Did you notice how nearly all the text was copy/pasted from Wikipedia?

Though the KDE one was copy/pasted from the initial KDE email.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#13

Post by kristopolous »

linguae wrote: post #5

This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection ( http://toastytech.com/guis/ ), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs. Some feedback: 1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs…

I was honestly expecting it to start with things like arithmometers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppXnnWAssoI), Cooke and Wheatstone 5-needle telegraphs (https://m.youtube.com/shorts/YKSCqtKZOwg), or perhaps a dictaphone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictaphone) and what about the rich history of fax machines such as the Pantelegraph (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph). Here's a newspaper being printed by radiofax in the 1930s for instance (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krant_per_fax_-_Fa...)

Speaking of communications, there's things like Strowger switches (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI&t=111) which I think count because that's what people were interfacing whilst using the phone (this became crossbars and relays in the 1910s and 20s respectively)

Relays and telephone tech btw is how Electro the smoking robot from the 1939 world's fair worked (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AuyTRbj8QSA)

Even if we want to limit to computers, we have batch versus time-sharing flow, teletype versus graphical terminals and along those lines you have the work of groups like Evans & Sutherland in the 1970s (such as the line drawing system 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS-1_(Line_Drawing_System-1) ) or Scientific Data Systems which was later acquired by Xerox. You also have the world of analog computers, the most famous of which is the slide rule.

Even then you can go back to the 19th century Jacquard Loom, which even has a solution to "Hello World" on Rosetta Code (https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Jacquard_Loom)

Then you have specialty machines such as the Fairlight CMI synthesizer with the lightpen interface (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iOlPCpSmhRM&t=40) which really laid the groundwork of most DAWs to this day. For music there's lots of things. The theremin which you all know about but also things like Nikolai Voinov's "Paper Sound" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmejo9WL2gY

You also have 1970s CAD computers, many of which were built by large companies like Mercedes, Nissan, Ford and General Motors (https://www.cadazz.com/cad-software-history-1970s.htm)

Then there's video compositing systems as well such as the lightpen based CMX-600 from 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUdHncIbq8

The history is way richer then this. Nobody has really given it a good general effort IMHO. Maybe I'm the guy? I hope not. That's a lot of work.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#14

Post by hoten »

kristopolous wrote: post #13
linguae wrote: post #5

This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection ( http://toastytech.com/guis/ ), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs. Some feedback: 1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs…

I was honestly expecting it to start with things like arithmometers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppXnnWAssoI ), Cooke and Wheatstone 5-needle telegraphs ( https://m.youtube.com/shorts/YKSCqtKZOwg ), or perhaps a dictaphone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictaphone ) and what about the rich history of fax machines such as the Pantelegraph ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph ). Here's a newspaper being…

pretty sure Hackernews would buy this book in bulk. Be the guy!

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#15

Post by eesmith »

jamessb wrote: post #10
linguae wrote: post #5

This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection ( http://toastytech.com/guis/ ), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs. Some feedback: 1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs…

There is also the GUIdebook Graphical User Interface Gallery: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots (the panel on the right lets you select a "component" like "Notepad" and see how it looked in each system)

That GUIdebook appears to be the source of many of these images.

  % curl -s https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/lisaos10.png | sha256sum
  7f4216c0c688c8d6942ddf6457300df7c8f86106729ec4e11c0f6a7d37fd89e5  -
  % curl -s https://history.user-interface.io/img/apple-lisa/desktop-with-applications.png | sha256sum
  7f4216c0c688c8d6942ddf6457300df7c8f86106729ec4e11c0f6a7d37fd89e5  -
Other images come from http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html , eg, visually compare http://toastytech.com/guis/os211menu.png with https://history.user-interface.io/img/OS-2/cursor.png .

Both the GUIdebook Graphical User Interface Gallery and Nathan Lineback/Toasty Tech's GUI Gallery are significantly more comprehensive than the linked-to page.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#17

Post by yreg »

memetomancer wrote: post #4

minor nit - this is a very poorly named site. A better name might be "the history of workstation and personal computer graphical user interfaces", a very far cry from blanket coverage of all "user interfaces". Even foregoing simple UI such as the handle of a hammer, or even the mechanical interfaces of yesteryear such as the differences between a Curta calculator and the original Burroughs adding machine, or a Jacqua…

www.the-history-of-workstation-and-personal-computer-graphical-user-interfaces.io ?

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#19

Post by IYasha »

sedan_baklazhan wrote: post #9

If only this quite interesting work could be read on a normal, no-JS webpage! Scrolling to see more content fading in is such a bad UI practice. Completely negating all the natural reading experience.

At least you're lucky enough to see some content at all :))

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#20

Post by AlbertoGP »

eesmith wrote: post #12
SeanLuke wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was dumbfounded to find NeXTSTEP missing: it was among the very most influential GUIs in history. Much of 95's UI (and OS/2's UI) were stolen directly from it, and badly, right down to icons. This page also seems to focus not on UIs, not on GUIs, but just on GUIs for personal computers. No discussion of the tablet->PDA->phone->small device UI evolution at all, even though that UI route has now had profound impact e…

Did you notice how nearly all the text was copy/pasted from Wikipedia? Though the KDE one was copy/pasted from the initial KDE email.

You seem to be right: I just picked one, “Xerox Star”, and it is copied from Wikipedia with a couple of changes: “was” → “is”, “mouse” → “mouse (two-button)”

I think that putting attributions on each entry would be too distracting, I’d rather keep the clean style that focuses on the content, but there should be some attribution in the page footer.

Edit: Wow, also the pictures are lifted without attribution as noted in this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093743

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