History of the graphical user interface

So, the design was based on the childlike characteristics of hand–eye coordination, rather than use of command languages, user-defined macro procedures, or automated transformation of data as later used by adult professionals.

The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers during the late 1970s and early 1980s, notably the Three Rivers PERQ, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, and the first Sun workstations.

The modern WIMP GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Dan Ingalls, David Smith, Clarence Ellis and a number of other researchers.

However, the Apple work extended PARC's considerably, adding manipulatable icons, and drag and drop manipulation of objects in the file system (see Macintosh Finder) for example.

[13] Jef Raskin warns that many of the reported facts in the history of the PARC and Macintosh development are inaccurate, distorted or even fabricated, due to the lack of usage by historians of direct primary sources.

It was fully mouse-driven, used a bit-mapped display for both text and graphics, included on-line help, and allowed the user to open a number of programs at once, each in its own window, and switch between them to multitask.

The GEM desktop faded from the market with the withdrawal of the Atari ST line in 1992 and with the popularity of the Microsoft Windows 3.0 in the PC front around the same period of time.

This common consent ended with release of version 2.0 of AmigaOS, which re-introduced proper names to the installation floppies of AmigaDOS, Workbench, Extras, etc.

[33] Because most of the very early IBM PC and compatibles lacked any common true graphical capability (they used the 80-column basic text mode compatible with the original MDA display adapter), a series of file managers arose, including Microsoft's DOS Shell, which features typical GUI elements as menus, push buttons, lists with scrollbars and mouse pointer.

Advanced file managers for MS-DOS were able to redefine character shapes with EGA and better display adapters, giving some basic low resolution icons and graphical interface elements, including an arrow (instead of a coloured cell block) for the mouse pointer.

This created a fast-growing market, opening an opportunity for commercial exploitation and of easy-to-use interfaces and making economically viable the incremental refinement of the existing GUIs for home systems.

Also, the spreading of high-color and true-color capabilities of display adapters providing thousands and millions of colors, along with faster CPUs and accelerated graphic cards, cheaper RAM, storage devices orders of magnitude larger (from megabytes to gigabytes) and larger bandwidth for telecom networking at lower cost helped to create an environment in which the common user was able to run complicated GUIs which began to favor aesthetics.

Both Win95 and WinNT could run 32-bit applications, and could exploit the abilities of the Intel 80386 CPU, as the preemptive multitasking and up to 4 GiB of linear address memory space.

Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign,[36] Windows 95 was a major success in the marketplace at launch and shortly became the most popular desktop operating system.

[37] Windows 95 saw the beginning of the browser wars, when the World Wide Web began receiving a great deal of attention in popular culture and mass media.

As versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years, Microsoft used its desktop dominance to push its browser and shape the ecology of the web mainly as a monoculture.

Mac OS X 10.3 introduced features to improve usability including Exposé, which is designed to make finding open windows easier.

With Mac OS X 10.7 released in July 2011, included support for full screen apps and Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) released in September 2015 support creating a full screen split view by pressing the green button on left upper corner of the window or Control+Cmd+F keyboard shortcut.

In the early days of X Window development, Sun Microsystems and AT&T attempted to push for a GUI standard called OPEN LOOK in competition with Motif.

A new emphasis on providing an integrated and uniform interface to the user brought about new desktop environments, such as KDE Plasma 5, GNOME and Xfce which have supplanted CDE in popularity on both Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

These object-oriented graphic engines driven by user interface classes and methods were then standardized into the Amiga environment and changed Amiga Workbench to a complete and modern guided interface, with new standard gadgets, animated buttons, true 24-bit-color icons, increased use of wallpapers for screens and windows, alpha channel, transparencies and shadows as any modern GUI provides.

There is a brief article on Ambient and descriptions of MUI icons, menus and gadgets at aps.fr Archived September 7, 2005, at the Wayback Machine and images of Zune stay at main AROS site.

Version 1.1 (released 1988) included Presentation Manager (PM), an implementation of IBM Common User Access, which looked a lot like the later Windows 3.1 UI.

NeXTSTEP's GUI was the first to feature opaque dragging of windows in its user interface, on a comparatively weak machine by today's standards, ideally aided by high performance graphics hardware.

BeOS was developed on custom AT&T Hobbit-based computers before switching to PowerPC hardware by a team led by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée as an alternative to Mac OS.

Because of this, these devices have their own famed user interfaces and operating systems that have large homebrew communities dedicated to creating their own visual elements, such as icons, menus, wallpapers, and more.

As high-powered graphics hardware draws considerable power and generates significant heat, many of the 3D effects developed between 2000 and 2010 are not practical on this class of device.

This has led to the development of simpler interfaces making a design feature of two dimensionality such as exhibited by the Metro (Modern) UI first used in Windows 8 and the 2012 Gmail redesign.

[citation needed][dubious – discuss] In the first decade of the 21st century, the rapid development of GPUs led to a trend for the inclusion of 3D effects in window management.

It is based in experimental research[citation needed] in user interface design trying to expand the expressive power of the existing toolkits in order to enhance the physical cues that allow for direct manipulation.