The Graphical User Interface

By Nathan Lineback

April 1973The first operational Alto

computer is completed at Xerox PARC.

• The Alto is the first system to pull together all of the elements of the modern Graphical User Interface.

• Features: 3-button mouse. Bit-mapped display. The use of graphical windows. Ethernet network.

1980: Three Rivers Computer

Corporation introduces the the Perq graphical workstation.

1981 June: Xerox introduces the Star,

the commercial successor to the Alto.

• Notable features: Double-clickable icons, overlapping windows, dialog boxes and a 1024*768 monochrome display

1983: Apple introduces the Lisa.

• Notable features: Pull down menus and menu bars.

Visi Corp releases Visi On, the first integrated graphical software environment for IBM PCs.

1984: January: Apple introduces

the Macintosh.

September: Digital Research announces its GEM icon/desktop user interface for 8086- and IBM compatible computers. It also was later ported to the Atari ST

1985: July: Commodore introduces

the Amiga 1000 with the Amiga Workbench Version 1.0

August: Microsoft finally releases the first version of Windows. (Did not sell well)

• Features: Windows can not be overlapped, but are instead "tiled".

1987: March - Apple introduces the

Apple Macintosh II, the first colour Macintosh.

• Features: 640*480*256 color with 24 bit color card available.

Microsoft releases the second version of Windows, version 2.03. (Did not sell well)

• Features: Finally has resizable / overlapping windows and new windowing controls.

1989: October: IBM releases OS/2

1.10 Standard Edition (SE) The 1.10 GUI was written by Microsoft and looked like Windows 2.

October: The NeXT Computer is released for $6500.

1990: Commodore releases Amiga

Workbench 2 for the A3000.

• Features: New 3d effects, a revised menu system and many other improvements

May 1990: Windows 3.0 released by Microsoft (Major seller)

• Features: Program Manager shell.

1992: IBM releases OS/2 Version 2.0, a

true 32-bit OS.

• Features a new "Workplace Shell", an object oriented user interface that is heavily integrated with the rest of the OS

March: Microsoft introduces Windows 3.1. The user interface is basically the same as Windows 3.0 but now includes their "multimedia" enhancements.

1993: May: Microsoft releases the first version of Windows

NT, their 32-bit OS. They give it the version number "3.1" and use the same user interface they do for regular Windows 3.1. Made available for Intel, Power PC, Alpha, and MIPS systems

1994: QNX Software Systems releases the first embeddable

microkernel windowing system, the Photon microGUI

1995: Microsoft introduces Windows

95 on August 24th. (Now has total market dominance)

October: Be introduced BeOS. The first version was designed to run on a custom multiprocessor system known as the "BeBox". Later made available for Power PC and Intel systems.

1996:

IBM Releases OS/2 Warp 4 with a significant facelift

Microsoft releases Windows NT 4.0 with the same user interface as Windows 95

1998: June 25, 1998: Microsoft releases Windows 98.

• Features: Internet Explorer Web browser application takes over the role of the Windows shell, advertising right on the desktop, entire help system replaced by Internet Explorer

1999: March - Apple releases Mac

OS X Server, a Unix based OS with their Macintosh GUI

June 1999 - RISCOS Ltd releases RISC OS 4 for RiscPC, A7000 or A7000+ machines

2000: January 5 -Apple announces

Aqua, the new look for their upcoming MacOS X client

February 17 - Microsoft Windows 2000 (AKA Windows NT 5) becomes available in stores.

• Features: The Internet Explorer web browser application finally takes over the Windows NT UI

2000: March - The X Consortium

released the X Window System version 4.0. For Unix/Linux variants

Features: The main new feature was multi-screen support. Free GUI for PC’s.

Microsoft Windows ME is shipped to customers.

2001: October 2001 - Microsoft Windows XP becomes

available in stores.

Bibliography

All data has been taken from…

and abbreviated slightly by Patrick Harlow

http://toastytech.com/guis/