Vannevar Bush

1930

Douglas Engelbart

December 9, 1968

hypertext linking
full-screen document editing
context-sensitive help
networked document collaboration
e-mail
instant messenging
video conferencing

Individual windows in Smalltalk were contained by a graphical border, and stood out against the grey pattern of the background below them. They each had a title bar on the top line of each window which could be used to identify the window and move it around the screen. Similar to BeOS, the title bar did not stretch the full length of the window, but started at the top left and only extended as far as the title itself. Windows could overlap other windows on the screen, and a selected window would move itself to the top of the "stack." The concept of "icons" was also invented at this time — small iconic representations of programs or documents that could be clicked on to run them or manipulate them. Popup menus were also invented at the same time — the user would click one of the mouse buttons and hierarchical, graphical menus based on the task at hand would appear at the last position of the mouse cursor. Also appearing for the first time were scroll bars, radio buttons and dialog boxes.

$ 17,000

$ 10,000

The Lisa user interface invented other GUI concepts that we still use today. While SmallTalk and the Xerox Star had icons that represented files, the Lisa interface was the first to have the idea that icons could represent all files in the filesystem, which could then be browsed through using a hierarchal directory structure where each directory opened in a new window. The idea of "drag-and-drop" was also invented at this time, and the concept of using drag and drop to do file manipulation (for example, selecting a group of files with the mouse and then dragging them to a new folder to copy them) naturally developed from this concept. Less visible but still important to the user interface was the idea of "resource forks," which embedded information about a file separately from the file itself, and the idea of "creator classes" meant that each file could be assigned an application that would launch when you double-clicked on that file. One critical advance from the Lisa team came from an Apple engineer who was not a former PARC employee, but had seen the demonstration of Smalltalk. He thought he had witnessed the Alto's ability to redraw portions of obscured windows when a topmost window was moved: this was called "regions". In fact, the Alto did not have this ability, but merely redrew the entire window when the user selected it. Despite the difficulty of this task, regions were implemented in the Lisa architecture and remain in GUIs to this day. (Try rapidly moving, say, an Explorer window over top of a Word document. If your eyes are very fast, you can still see which parts of the window are redrawn and which are not.)

Other GUIs during 80s

VisiOn By this time more than one company besides Apple was working on graphical user interfaces for personal computers. VisiCorp, makers of the first ever spreadsheet VisiCalc, was working on a graphical interface for IBM PCs. It was released as VisiOn in 1983, but the extremely high price (US$1,495 for the software alone) and steep hardware requirements for the time (PC-XT with hard disk, 512KB of memory, and a mouse) kept it from being a big seller. In addition, it was fairly clunky, using the monochrome CGA graphics mode (640 by 200 pixels) and being much more text-based than other GUIs. For example, it did not use icons at all, requiring the user to click on text labels to start programs or work with documents. It did not use proportionally-spaced fonts, the way the Alto, Star, Lisa and Macintosh had; instead, all characters were of fixed width. It even abandoned the diagonally-pointing mouse cursor arrow, reverting to 1968 with a vertical one!