The Evolution of the GUI

**Lemur** · 08-13-2006, 19:05

Looking at this made me all nostalgic. What was the first GUI you used? What did you think of it then? What would you think of it now?

**caravel** · 08-13-2006, 19:22

The first GUI I would have used would probably have been Windows 1.0 on one of those old amber monochrome screens. I have virtually no experience with macs, though the mac GUI always looked and worked better than the windows one. The windows GUI always looked very ugly and cumbersome with all of the configuration scattered all over the interface, located in obscure programs or only accessible via the registry, right through to XP and it's cartoon themes. Out of the most modern GUI's KDE is still looking good, but it's just so bloated (C++).

Fast clean lined GUI's seem to be a thing of the past, it's all about cosmetics and effects now, even in the Linux world.

**Blodrast** · 08-14-2006, 00:42

hmmm, long time... musta been either some windows 3.0 on some 286's, or borland's gui's for turbo pascal and/or c... in the early nineties.
Before that, couldn't get access to computers - was not fortunate enough to be born in the right part of the world, or rich enough

Also used some Mac's in 1992 or so, does that count ? It was still quite early :)

edit: I agree with Caravel, it's disgusting how overbloated most window/file managers have got to be, _especially_ on Linux, which is supposed to be different from Windows as far as resource hog-capabilities go...

**Geezer57** · 08-14-2006, 14:29

Hmmmm, the first GUI I used was GEOS, for the Commodore 64, in 1985. After that, it was WorkBench 1.3, for the Amiga. I still miss that one - very efficient multitasking!

**LeftEyeNine** · 08-14-2006, 21:58

Mine was a Windows 3.1.

However, yesterday my homemate wanted some help with command line. Oh well he probably thought that I was insane after seeing me with a smiling face tapping the keys like kid playing with his favorite toy.

DOS rules and owns and folds all others into seven and puts into the pocket.

**drone** · 08-14-2006, 23:10

Originally Posted by LeftEyeNine

Command line rules and owns and folds all others into seven and puts into the pocket.

Fixed!

You really need a command line capability to get the real work done.

First "GUI" I worked on would be some version of X running on MicroVax machines. Used X a lot in college on various Sun/Mac/PC platforms, but again these were mainly just portals to command line.

**whyidie** · 08-17-2006, 22:05

Yes, Mac was my first GUI. They were in all the public schools. 2nd would be OpenWindows.

**x-dANGEr** · 08-18-2006, 10:29

SO.. Did they make movies on Computers back then with those "strange" GUIs?

**Blodrast** · 08-18-2006, 22:57

Are you being serious, or sarcastic ? You know it's hard to tell on an internet forum, especially when one doesn't even use smilies...

To answer your question though, assuming it's in good faith, no. Not enough computing, and/or real-time processing power. Of course you'd have games with short animated sequences, but "movies", in the sense that you probably mean (i.e., hollywood-like), no.

Keep in mind that in the late eighties - early nineties PC cpu's were still below 100 MHz... and while cpu frequency isn't everything, it's still a decent measuring criterion...

**Xiahou** · 08-19-2006, 03:13

Tandy Deskmate!

At least, that's the first one I can still remember..... did the old TRS-80 CoCos have a gui at some point? I think I was about 6yrs old when I got my first CoCo, so it's tough to remember.

**caravel** · 08-20-2006, 02:31

This should be familiar to most of you:

http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history...s/briefing.jpg

It was produced using GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System) and is IIRC the only bit of CGI used in the first star wars movie. I believe that later movies used SGI's OpenGL.

That was about the limit in those days.