History of the GUI 1984 to the present day

History of computing Originally a deck of punch cards had to be submitted and batch processed in order to run a computer programme It was akin to marking your choice of horses with a pencil at the TAB You would then receive a crude ink jet print out Used from 1886 – 1990’s

Magnetic Tape Made long term storage of vast amounts of data possible Prone to breakage One tape could store 1Tb Used from 1951 to present

First User Interface Douglas Englebart demonstrated first interface in 1968) This was the first time a “mouse” had been used

Palo Alto Reseach Centre (PARC) Xerox feared the demise of paper so formed PARC to work on their dream projects They invented Laser printing but had no way to control it, so they developed the Xerox Alto The screen was shaped like paper and unlike other fixed character displays, each pixel could be turned on and off independently

Zerox Star The advent of Object Oriented programming language in Xerox’s small talk allowed the development of a Windows like environment Windows could be stacked on top of each other. Icons made their emergence Scroll bars, dialogue boxes and radio buttons appeared The First Alto document processor cost $17,000

Apple Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began in their garage The ideas from PARC were brought across along with technicians who wished to see the Xerox ideas turned commercial Their icon based interface called “Lisa” would eventually do away with command type lines

Windows Bill Gates orginally worked as a 3 rd party developer for Apple His early versions of Windows 1 and 2 were clunky and had to compete with many other GUI developers – Commodore, Atari, Acorn By the 1990’s with version 3 of Windows, only Windows and Apple were left in the GUI wars Windows 95 then broke the all time sales record when released

Windows

Mac OSX and Aqua Aqua introduced the idea of a GUI where every window was double- buffered in memory, so that any redraws happen off-screen and aren't visible Introduced the stretching and squeezing of windows into a dock Introduced Expose where windows would shrink so all open ones can be fitted onto a screen at the same time.

Mac OSX and Aqua

For further information design-between / design-between /

The mobile revolution GUI design got more interesting with the evolution of the mobile interface Other developers came on-board, namely Google with their Android interface Apple was the first with iOS and the iPhone dominating the market early on iOS – A Visual History – (see below) ptual/MobileHIG/ ptual/MobileHIG/

The rise of Android

Android new design guidelines New Materials Google Android interface – see the Design guidelines And further examples