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The History of User Interfaces

history.user-interface.io

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Re: The History of User Interfaces

#41

Post by kristopolous »

hoten wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I appreciate the encouragement. I'd need a general hypothesis to make it interesting and give it a narrative structure.

It's just a giant relay race where people are grabbing batons left and right and then taking it a few steps.

It's always "well I've got this thing and here is how it has to be used" and we're still in that world of limitation as I drag my thumb across a handheld piece of glass to send this.

What we do is a function of what we make. For a deep dive I'll direct you to 1920s mechanical television on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television

The machine and interface are artefacts of each other; reality's constraints on our ideas. It'll have to be motivated by something more specific than that though. Otherwise it'll just be a 2,000 page encyclopedia

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#42

Post by wizofaus »

kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

Settings is the gear above the "power" icon? The apps at the top of my start menu are ones that were most recently installed. TBH 95% of the time I just type in the name anyway.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#43

Post by mngnt »

egfx wrote: post #2

Browsing 1992 through 1995 gave me tears. Btw, where is Vista, ME, or Windows 98, or 7 for that matter? Vista had an especially unique UI with Aero and Windows 7 was an adaptation of that I believe.

Non-inclusion of Vista is really strange given how influential it was.

I used to be among those Linux users that wanted to make the GUI look cool™. I spent a LOT of time browsing gnome-look.org and at the height of Vista popularity, the Aero knockoffs were everywhere.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#45

Post by mikelevins »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #31
kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

I feel like what you’re describing boils down to a change in priorities for designs and how the user behavior is measured. Today, it seems to be mostly about recording what users do and then endlessly modifying the UI to extract the desired behaviors. This results in these kinds of layouts where a clean choice takes a back seat and user manipulation takes the front. This is less so the case with actual tools and UI’s…

An old friend of mine and I used to amuse each other by writing press releases for a fictional computing company that we called Infernosoft. Its tag line was "Software from Hell," but it also supposedly made hardware.

One of its fictional products was the Infernosoft Auto-optimizing Keyboard. As you use it, it measures your usage and optimizes itself in response. It makes frequently-struck keys larger and moves them closer to the center of the home row.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, then you undoubtedly have a bright future in today’s software market.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#46

Post by masswerk »

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…

There are also some interesting GUI elements in GENESYS, a parametric image animation program for the TX-2 at MIT, by Ronald M. Baecker (1969) [1,2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYIPKLxoTcQ

[2] Baecker, Ronald M. (1969). Interactive Computer-Mediated Animation. PhD Thesis, MIT. http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-06...

Also mind the use of a mouse in another video animation software from around 1970, by Marceli Wein and Nestor Burtnyk, running on a SEL 840A in Canada, three years before a mouse was used at PARC:

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPIE_h8jf6E

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#47

Post by mngnt »

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.

For bonus points, try to visit from a smartphone. a few scrolls into the page, I got a modal begging me to subscribe and it was not closable - positioned too high so I didn't get to the x to close it, I guess.

Ironic - a website about user interfaces has a UI so bad that I could but glimpse the content.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#48

Post by wizofaus »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #31
kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

I feel like what you’re describing boils down to a change in priorities for designs and how the user behavior is measured. Today, it seems to be mostly about recording what users do and then endlessly modifying the UI to extract the desired behaviors. This results in these kinds of layouts where a clean choice takes a back seat and user manipulation takes the front. This is less so the case with actual tools and UI’s…

"how dumb the majority of all users really is" - you could throw in how "dumb" grammar rules are too, given that "the majority of all users" might logically seem like it's singular and hence "is" would be correct, but I'm 90% sure in all cases that you say "the majority of X's", it acts as a plural noun phrase. I.e. it definitely should be "really are".

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#49

Post by kristopolous »

masswerk wrote: post #46
kristopolous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are also some interesting GUI elements in GENESYS, a parametric image animation program for the TX-2 at MIT, by Ronald M. Baecker (1969) [1,2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYIPKLxoTcQ [2] Baecker, Ronald M. (1969). Interactive Computer-Mediated Animation. PhD Thesis, MIT. http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-06... Also mind the use of a mouse in another video animation software from…

Ah the TX-2! That takes us back to Sutherland and the famous key frame animator, always good

Check out the IBM 2250 John Whitney is using in this 1968 video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jIv-EcX9tUs where he basically invents screensavers for an earlier foray into animation

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#50

Post by shakna »

wizofaus wrote: post #42
kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

Settings is the gear above the "power" icon? The apps at the top of my start menu are ones that were most recently installed. TBH 95% of the time I just type in the name anyway.

Icons are ambiguous. Everybody violates expectations about what an image does. The older UIs had text. More than that, settings was a folder just like every other folder, so you knew what would happen if you clicked on particular section.

Things were fairly unified, even though the standards didn't integrate everything. You knew what would open a new dropdown, and what would open a new window, at a glance. There was no need of any implicit knowledge.

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