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…
It also misses all the "text GUI" interfaces found on eg. MS-DOS and mainframes. These are super-efficient to navigate and use using just a keyboard, and extremely fast for data entry in comparison to modern systems.
The History of User Interfaces
81–90 of 117 posts
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#82Xerox PARC: the birthplace of many many many PC related technologies. It's so sad that the legend is gone.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#83I generally avoid slipping in overt promotion of my book [1], but this cries out for it. Find out how it really went down, what the debates were like, and what it was like to be there. This is a quickie, copy-and-paste job from publicly available sources. Mostly accurate, except for calling the Alto keyset "the Alto keyboard." As some of the comments point out, it's quite incomplete. [1] https://www.albertcory.io/inv…
When payday rolls around again I'll get this, thanks for pointing it out.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#84This 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…
MIT Project Athena was also hugely influential: X Windows wasn't the only thing to spin out, but MATLAB and other pre-cursors of today's Jupyter style notebooks. The VAX super-mini grid could be used at night as a renderfarm ;)
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#85I 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…
But the start bar is completely customizable... You can turn off recommendations, remove the default apps, add any other app including settings, set the size, etc. Once you spend a couple minutes setting it up, it's less cluttered than any previous Windows OS.
> You can turn off recommendations
Not really. When you turn off recommendations, the app icons are hidden but the space for recommendations stays there! Yes, just a big ol' block of whitespace with a prompt to turn recommendations back on. It takes up like 30%+ of the start menu.
It's a dark pattern.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#86If 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.
Good news, a lot of the screenshots are just pulled from http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html, which works perfectly well without JS.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#87Two things I noticed from looking at the screenshots: 1. The MS Windows 7 Task Manager look very similar to the KDE 1 version (from the late nineties): https://history.user-interface.io/img/kde-1/task-manager.jpe... 2. In 1990, Microsoft referred to plain text files on the local system as “on-line documents”: https://history.user-interface.io/img/windows-3.0/notepad.pn...
I always thought KDE of that vintage was extremely attractive and pretty damn usable... Shame it got too "shiny" after KDE 1.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#88This 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…
Would've also loved to see Oberon and Plan 9 on there. The list just seems to be some random choices of mainstream GUIs.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#89I generally avoid slipping in overt promotion of my book [1], but this cries out for it. Find out how it really went down, what the debates were like, and what it was like to be there. This is a quickie, copy-and-paste job from publicly available sources. Mostly accurate, except for calling the Alto keyset "the Alto keyboard." As some of the comments point out, it's quite incomplete. [1] https://www.albertcory.io/inv…
When payday rolls around again I'll get this, thanks for pointing it out.
Thank you!
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#90This 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…
Yes, CLI is missing from the study but so are alternatives like Natural and Tangible and Zoomable. NUI/TUI/ZUI/3DUIs are all very relevant for Spatial Computing and have historical antecedents worthy of note here too.