The graphical user interface (GUI) is the now very familiar user interface that allows you to interact with computers or smartphones through graphical icons using a mouse or touch screen. Years ago you would have used a text-based user interface, and typed strange sounding commands. You can still use these the “Terminal” or command line modes of todays operating systems. GUIs emerged in the 1970s and have evolved from the rather rudimentary systems to quite complex ones today. Whether you write programs, emails, use a word processor, a spreadsheet or play a game it is the existence of GUIs that makes their use simple for you. This page relates the graphical user interface history.

Who is the author of the GUI? Companies like Xerox Parc and Apple are often cited. The original ideas seem to be influenced by the paper of Vannevar Bush, who described a hypothetical electronic device called Memex that used an electronic desktop, like todays GUI. These ideas were later expounded in his 1945 article “As We May Think” and they influenced Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart expressed his view on computers in the 1962 paper “Augmenting Human Intellect“, on how computers would help people solve problems and design things. Seminal contributions to GUI development were made by Engelbrt, Alan Kay and others from the Xerox Parc team, some of whom later migrated to other companies including Apple and Microsoft. What you get today, owes its existence to contributions from many teams and as this usually happens ideas migrated between developers.

The appearance and rapid development of the GUIs in the 1980s, introduced the era of consumer oriented PC development, with emphasis on use of applications developed by others, without the need to understand computers. In many cases this has nothing to do with Bushes idea of augmenting human intellect, but does prove useful. A timeline of the appearance of the graphical user interfaces, in mainly the 20th century, is given below. This does not include all variations of the environments but aims to highlight the beginnings.

1968

oNline. It all started with a first demonstration of a mouse operated system by D. Engelbart using the oN-Line system in 1968. During the first demo, Engelbart used a standard typewriter-style keyboard, a five-key function type coded keyboard (allowing 32 combinations), and a small rectangular box with two wheels connected to the computer: the first mouse. The demo used a mouse pointer and featured hypertext linking, full-screen document editing, context-sensitive help, networked document collaboration, messaging, and went to the extent of including video conferencing!

1973-74

XEROX Alto. In 1973 appeared the Alto computer developed by XEROX Parc, which featured full raster-based, bitmapped graphics. It had a somewhat crude GUI: the “Neptune Directory Editor.” Neptune used Alto’s three – sometimes differently coloured- button mouse, graphical buttons, and file lists, but did not include icons. A graphical word processor “Bravo” and a bit mapped graphics editor allowing image manipulation, like the later “Paint”, were developed, but each used a different user interface. In 1974 PARC Alan Kay and other researchers at the Learning Research Group (LRG) created the object oriented Smalltalk-71 language with a graphical environment. This allowed creation of the GUI with the desktop metaphor, icons, scrollbars, superposed windows, popup menus etc. In successive years PARC researchers worked on the ALTO successors called Dolphin and Dandelion.

Alto File Manager. Click to enlarge.

Alto Smalltalk-76 GUI

1979-80

3RCC PERQ. In 1979 the pioneering PERQ workstation, a Dolphin derivative, was launched by Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC), founded by Brian Rosen & others, who had worked on Dolphin for PARC. 3RCC specialised initially in gaphics systems. Alto was not a commercial product, wheareas PERQ was designed to be a marketed personal graphical workstation and played an important role in GUI history. It had a bit-mapped 768*1024 portrait monochrome display with hardware to accelerate drawing. PERQ was demonstrated in 1979 at the computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH. The PERQ window manager partitioned the screen into overlapping, user dimensionable windows and supported menus and light buttons. The “process mechanism” used the window manager to allow direct user control of multiple concurrent processes. Applications developed for PERQ included graph plotting software, a graphical spreadsheet package,charting software, games etc. PERQ was introduced in Europe following interest by the UK Rutherford Appleton laboratory that led the British ICL to callaborate with 3RCC and market PERQ in Europe. PERQ was also sold in other countries like India.

The PERQ GUI screen.

1981

Xerox Star. Xerox finally marketed its GUI based system: the Xerox 8010 Information System (Dandelion) with a fully integrated desktop metaphor and application suite. The STAR used a 1024*808 pixels monochrome display. The GUI used tiled, non-overlapping windows, but other applications could support overlapping windows. In 1985 XEROX produced a revamped version: the Xerox 6085 (Daybreak) system with an improvred Star software called ViewPoint, with various improvements including overlapping windows.

Xerox 8010 GUI.