4 thoughts on “GUIs, Then And Now”

  1. They’re also missing Unix GUIs like SunView (I was using it in 1988 on a Sun-3 with a whopping 4 MB of RAM, running EASY5/W as my main application), the Apollo DomainOS, and all of the stuff built on top of MIT’s X Window System. My work (large aerospace company) was exclusively Unix and X from about 1991 through 1997.

    Also, it still bugs me today that Windows has never implemented something that OS/2 had in 1994: when you move a file, any shortcuts to that file automatically update. Using OS/2 in the mid-90’s was a vastly superior experience than the Windows experience, even after Windows95 came out.

  2. They also left out just about every iteration of the Mac OS between System 7 and OS X, but most of them looked a lot like System 7, the same way 2000 and ME (and NT) looked a lot like Windows 95.

    For that matter, they left out all of the Sun XWindow GUIs, unless there’s something I missed, or unless they consider them “close enough” to the Linux GUIs…

  3. Funny how that analog clock that started in Windows 1.0 has reared its ugly head again in Vista.

    It sucks resources and screen space. Like many other people, it’s the first feature I turned off. The digital clock in the corner since 95 is adequate. If they want to do me a favor, give me the option of displaying seconds with it, as Fedora Linux does…

  4. While as a whole, the Apollo’s DOMAIN/OS was far ahead of its time, the GUI was basically a windowing-extension of a console terminal–everything was based around text-editing/command-entry windows. Very useful as a tech-oriented workstation, but not very “graphical”. The interface metaphor didn’t have a desktop, icons, etc…

    The omission of Sun and the various Sun windowing systems before X, and the inclusion of SGI’s Irix is odd, NeWS (which was what was shown for Irix) was developed by Sun. My recollection is that SGI didn’t really have a GUI before they went with NeWS, you only had a console that supported full screen 3D graphics (using IRIS GL).

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