When was the first graphical user interface invented

Another was that it proved difficult to push enough bits per second over the line to do serious graphics. Even after VDTs acquired the capability to write pixels as well as formed characters, running GUIs on them remained impractical because serial lines had a peak throughput far too low to support frequent screen repainting.

For reasonable update speed, graphics displays really need to be coupled more closely to the machine that is doing the rendering than a serial connection will allow. This is especially true if one needs to support the kind of high interactivity and frequently changing displays characteristic of games or GUIs; for this, only direct memory access will do.

Thus, the invention of the GUI had to wait until developments in silicon integrated circuits dropped the cost of computing power enough that a capable processor could be associated with each display, and the combination had become sufficiently inexpensive that machines could be dedicated to individuals' use. The other missing piece was Engelbart's invention of the mouse — and, just as significantly, the visible mouse pointer.

This more controllable inversion of the large, crude early trackballs meant that users could have a repertoire of two-dimensional input gestures to match the two-dimensional screen. It made interfaces based on direct visual manipulation of objects on-screen feasible for the first time.

The input device on the left appears to be a touch tablet, a mouse alternative similar to the trackpads on modern portables. Inspired by Engelbart's demo, in the PARC researchers built a pioneering machine called the Alto that featured a bit-mapped display and a mouse.

At around the same time PARC gave birth to two other technologies that would grow in importance along with the GUI; the Ethernet and the laser printer. From today's post-Alto point of view, screen shots of the Alto UI show a curious mix of modernity and crudity. What's present are all the logical components of GUIs as we know them — icons, windows, scrollbars, sliders, and the like.

What's missing, most conspicuously, is color. Also, the pseudo-3D sculptural effects of modern GUI buttons and other impedimenta are missing; the widgets are flat outline boxes, and the whole resembles nothing so much as an etch-a-sketch drawing of a modern interface.

It's a little sobering to reflect that most of what we have learned to add to GUIs since is eye candy. It was not until the early s that the implications of the PARC work would escape the laboratory and start to really transform human-computer interaction. There is no shortage of good accounts of that transformation, but most of them tend to focus on personal computers and the history of Apple, giving scant notice to the way the change interacted with and affected the Unix tradition.

After , however, and especially after , the stories of Unix, the PC, and the GUI began to re-converge in ways that would have deeply surprised most of their early partisans. Today, a Unix-centered take on the history of user interfaces, even GUIs, turns out to be a much less parochial view than one might have supposed ten or even five years ago. The entire story is a marvelous lesson for user-interface designers in how design innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum.

UI design is no more separable than other forms of engineering and art from the accidents of history and the constraints of economics; understanding the complex and erratic way that we got where we are may be a real help to readers who want to think about their design problems not simply as exercises but as responses to human needs. They had bitmapped displays and three-button mice. They featured a GUI built around overlapping windows, first implemented on the Alto as a workaround for the small size of its display.

These machines were tremendously influential. Word of them spread through the computer-science community, challenging other groups of designers to achieve similarly dramatic capabilities.

Less often told is that Jobs had been pre-primed for his epiphany by Apple employee Jef Raskin, whose thesis had inspired some of the PARC research. Raskin had a keen interest in advanced UI design and wanted to find some of the PARC concepts a home at Apple so he could continue pursuing them. One of the effects of the Alto was to popularize bit-mapped rather than vector-graphics displays. Most earlier graphics hardware had been designed to explicitly draw points, lines, arcs, and formed characters on a display, an approach which was relatively slow but economical because it required a minimum of expensive memory.

The Alto approach was to hang the expense and drive each screen pixel from a unique location in a memory map. In this model almost all graphics operations could be implemented by copying blocks of data between locations in memory, a technique named BitBlt by its inventors at PARC.

BitBlt simplified graphics programming enormously and played a vital role in making the Alto GUI feasible. The very first commercialization of this technology seems to have been a machine called the Perq [ 10 ] aimed primarily at scientific laboratories. The Perq's dates are difficult to pin down, but an early sales brochure [ 11 ] seems to establish that these machines were already being sold in August ; other sources claim that due to production delays they first shipped in November The Perq design featured the same style of portrait-mode high resolution display as the Alto.

There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. Douglas Engelbart, known today as an Internet pioneer, had a background in electrical engineering and worked during World War II as a radar operator.

He was inspired by Vannevar Bush's aforementioned essay to create a computer in which you could visually see what you were doing, one which allowed people to share knowledge and solve problems collectively. A part of his vision was made reality when he presented the oN-Line System to computer professionals in Englebart's machine was able to provide its user with document editing, video conferencing, instant messaging, and e-mail!

He and his team were the first to develop the looks of modern day computers: the mouse, a bit-mapped screen, and a keyboard, which worked in sync with one another to display text on a screen. Englebart's presentation was so impressive that it startled Xerox 's upper management, whose business focused on paper-based machines. It had several features of a modern operating system, being windows based with icons.

The windows could be moved around with the mouse and files and folders could be copied by dragging and dropping onto the target location. Apple Mac System 1. When first released, Amiga was ahead of its time. The GUI included features such as color graphics four colors: black, white, blue, orange , preemptive multitasking, stereo sound and multi-state icons selected and unselected.

Amiga Workbench 1. In this year Microsoft finally caught up with the whole graphical user interface craze and released Windows 1. The most interesting feature which later was omitted was the icon of the animated analog clock.

Microsoft Windows 1. The GUI was also ported to other computers but did not gain popularity on them. Source: Wikipedia. An interesting feature of this GUI is the support for vector icons. It was originally designed for the Commodore 64 and included a graphical word processor, called geoWrite and a paint program called geoPaint.

In this version, the actual management of the windows had significantly improved. The windows could be overlapped, resized, maximized and minimized. Microsoft Windows 2. This version of the GUI only supported monochrome, fixed icons. Steve Jobs came up with the idea to create the perfect research computer for universities and research labs. The GUI was initially monochrome, but version 1. This screenshot gives you have a peek into what would become the modern GUIs. The next minor version upgrade of the GUI showed slight improvements in many areas.

The icons looked nicer and the windows were smoother. Also, Microsoft hired Susan Kare to design the Windows 3. Microsoft Windows 3. Many improvements were made to this version of the GUI. The color scheme changed and a 3D look was introduced. The desktop could be divided vertically into screens of different resolutions and color depths, which nowadays seems a little odd. Commodore Amiga Workbench 2. Mac OS version 7. Subtle shades of grey, blue and yellow were added to icons.

Apple Mac OS System 7.