Graphical User Interfaces

  • The first graphical displays of computers were at first only textual (e.g. MS-DOS)
  • Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” (1968) - the first demonstration of interaction based on mouse and screen
  • Xerox Star (1981): first commercial GUI, with a desktop metaphor: windows, icons, folders, etc
    • Why a desktop metaphor? (Notice this isn’t a requirement…)
  • Apple Macintosh (1984): the first mass-market GUI
  • Microsoft Windows (1985): the most popular until today
  • Today: macOS, Linux desktop environments (GNOME, KDE), mobile operating systems (iOS, Android), touchscreen interfaces, gesture controls, voice commands
  • In the future? Virtual and augmented reality interfaces, natural language processing, AI-driven interfaces, etc…?

It is interesting to note how all of this moves out the focus of simply making a program run by itself, and now caring about how an user might behave. The human person is now introduced in the software loop.