The History of User Interfaces
history.user-interface.io
The History of User Interfaces
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Re: The History of User Interfaces
#2Browsing 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.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#3What's the theme here?
That is, even in the context of desktop graphical UIs I expected Englebart's oN-Line System (NLS), Sutherland's Sketchpad, X Windows, NeWS, and/or NeXTStep.
Broaden that and there's smartphone UIs.
Or Raskin's The Humane Environment (THE).
EDIT: OPEN LOOK tried to "fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar" long before KDE 1.0. There's also the Common Desktop Environment.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#4minor 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 Jacquard loom and so forth...
Limiting ourselves to just binary digital computers we're still missing a lot at this site. IBM 1401 card punch machines... the IBM 360 operator console... the VAX DCL, the original UNIX sh, etc., etc.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#5This 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. A command line interface, for example, is still a user interface, and in fact there has been much diversity of command line interfaces besides Unix and MS-DOS. For example, I remember reading in The Unix Haters Handbook critiques of the Unix shell, comparing it to the CLIs of other operating systems such as VMS. It would have been cool to have learned about the history of various CLIs and how they evolved. Regarding other user interfaces, there are touchscreens and voice, and even among GUIs there have been models that were not heavily influenced by the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, such as Symbolics Genera, Project Oberon, and Plan 9's 8 1/2 and rio GUIs.
2. Some highly influential GUIs are missing. For example, as influential Windows 95's UI was, its look and feel clearly shows influences from NeXTSTEP, the first GUI to introduce the gray, 3D, beveled look that Windows 95 embraced.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#6The list is kind of arbitrary. I don't feel the Amiga UI had any influence on anything what so ever. I was a huge Amiga fan and owned an Amiga 1000 the year it launched and then an Amiga 500 later but other than Amiga's unique multi-resolution system, which really was only something that was a product of the limits of old hardware, there was nothing special about its UX.
Similarly where's GEM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)
I'm sure there's a bunch of others missing for "The History of User Interfaces"
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#7Does Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad not deserve a mention? It was an early touchscreen / stylus interface from the 60s.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#8Browsing 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.
I concur about Windows Vista. For all the criticism that OS received, it did bring Windows a compositing desktop similar to Mac OS X, which was a crucial milestone to the GUI experience, which brought compositing desktops to more than 90% of personal computer users.
I believe Windows 98 and ME were omitted because this is largely a presentation of the evolution of GUIs. Windows 98 and ME did not substantially differ from Windows 95 in terms of their look-and-feel; the same can be said about Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#9If 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.
Re: The History of User Interfaces
#10This 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)