What was the first user interface

There's no doubt that the GUI created a comfortable environment that made personal computers attractive to the average person. And sales of home computers took off like a rocket. When Jobs saw this prototype, he had an epiphany and set out to bring the GUI to the public. Apple engineers developed Lisa , the first GUI-based computer available to the public. It was too expensive; no one bought it. But the seed germinated into a flower that would change the world. Released in and billed as "insanely great," the Macintosh caught the public eye with one of the most famous commercials ever.

This immortal television advertisement depicted users of IBM's PC as Orwellian drones trapped in the maw of a monochromatic, brutally mechanical, command-line interface, and dramatized their symbolic liberation by a woman bearing a new tool for home computations. Relatively inexpensive and fantastically easy to use, the "Mac" was a smashing success, despite the limited computing power and memory housed in the chassis. Although Steve Jobs' Macintosh, released in , was the first commercially successful computer with a GUI, the idea for a computer with an easy-to-use interface, was first published by engineer Vannevar Bush in A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.

It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers.

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.

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. It also made economic sense by removing the need for ink and printing materials. It became clear that having a digital user interface and pointing systems equivalent to a mouse could allow for a compelling user experience. The first system that could arguably be described as the first fully integrated desktop computer was the Xerox Star released in This led to others in the computer-science community to try and replicate similar advancements that lead to the release of machines such as the Apple Lisa Office System 1 , VisiCorp Visi On , and Mac OS System 1 Windows could be moved around the screen with the cursor, and files could be moved to different folders by dragging and dropping on the target window or icon.