There was a shortage of software, but companies were eager to develop for the Mac, seeing its potential for widespread infiltration into the non-techie market. One of the biggest software developers for the Macintosh was a company called Microsoft. Gates, who as near as I can tell has never had an original idea in his career, is nevertheless extremely good at copying the great ideas of others. Windows copied the conceptual framework of the Macintosh GUI, right down to the trash can which Microsoft calls a "recycle bin" , and marketed it as a platform for DOS-based computers.
Apple sued, but a less-than-technically inclined court ruled that it is legal to copy the "look and feel" of something if the internal mechanisms are different. This is mostly because, in the United States, the "look and feel" is defined as the "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program.
Apple lost, and Microsoft got to keep its GUI. It was ruled that porting a metaphor to another platform was not criminal. The rest is history. Apple is flailing around and Microsoft is poised for world domination, mostly on the strength of an idea that wasn't Gates' in the first place. But what a great idea it was. Today, personal computers are relatively easy to use because they are based on a visual language, representing system operations with icons and employing a visual metaphor - the desktop.
System 1. 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. 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.
It was quite a powerful machine for its time, using a microcoded bit-slice processor with a dedicated BitBlt instruction, and some Perqs remained in use as late as It supported at least five operating systems, including later in the s at least three in the Unix family.
Curiously, however, the designers seem to have discarded the mouse and retained only the touch tablet. Like the Alto the Blit had a mouse, a bit-mapped screen, and a powerful local processor in this case, a Motorola Unlike the Alto or Perq, it was designed to act as a smart terminal to a Unix minicomputer rather than for a network communicating directly with peer machines.
This difference in architecture reflected a basic difference in aims. While the PARC crew was free to reinvent the world, the Unix developers had history they were not interested in discarding. Plan 9, their successor to the Unix operating system, retained the ability to run most Unix code.
Outside of Bell Labs and the special context of Plan 9 this amphibian was a solution that never found a problem, and the Unix community's first attempt at integrating a PARC-style interface sank into obscurity.
A few years later, however, Blit-like machines with local-area-network jacks and the character-terminal features discarded would rise again, as the X terminal. It was called the Xerox Star, [ 13 ] and it was a failure. Technically, it was woefully underpowered, slow, and overpriced. Hesitant and inept marketing did not help matters. Many of the developers, sensing more willingness from Apple and other emerging PC companies to push the technology, had started to bail out of PARC in ; the failure of the Star accelerated the process.
Xerox, despite having pioneered the GUI and several of the other key technologies of modern computing, never turned a profit from them.
The Star interface pioneered the desktop metaphor that would be ubiquitous in later GUIs. The third key event of was the first IBM personal computer. This did not advance the state of the art in GUIs — in fact, the original PC-1 had graphics capability available only as an extra-cost option, and no mouse. Its slow microprocessor could not have supported a PARC-style GUI even if the will and the design skill had been there to produce one.
Even then, however, it was obvious that IBM's entry into the market would eventually change everything. The next milestone in the evolution of the GUI was actually to come out of the Unix world. That next milestone was the release of the first Sun Microsystems computer, yet another mating of Unix with an Alto-inspired hardware design. This one, however, would prove immensely more successful than the Perq or Blit. In fact it set the pattern for one of the most successful product categories in the history of the computer industry — what became known within a few years as the technical workstation.
Workstations were Unix machines with high-resolution bit-mapped displays and built-in Ethernet. Early in the workstation era most were designed to use the Motorola and its successors; later on they tended to be built around various and bit processors at a time when PC hardware was still struggling to transition from 8 to Workstations were designed like the Alto to be deployed as single-user machines on a local area network, but again like the Alto they were too expensive for individuals to own and were never marketed that way; instead they tended to be deployed in flocks, and the only way to get the use of one was to be a knowledge worker at a corporation or in academia.
The Sun workstations and their imitators added very little to the GUI design pattern set at PARC; slightly glossier screen widgets with pseudo-beveled edges were nearly the extent of the visible additions.
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