The Graphical User Interface – 1945 to 1980 | Hacker News Reader

The Graphical User Interface – 1945 to 1980

lunduke.substack.com

37 pointsWoodenChair10 comments

Working at xerox during this time I've had my hand in a fair number of alto features this article mentions. I vaguely remember a young man who smelled of a peculiar odor nagging myself and others on campus about how our code worked. Yes this was Steve jobs and a lot of what we taught him and his entourage still remain in the macos and iphones even today.

The article is thin on user interfaces. It jumps from a 1940 idea of GUI to Mother of all demos and then to mention some GUIs and OSs from the 80s. AFAIK there were a lot of GUIs during the 80s with only a handful (Macintosh, Amiga, X windows, MS Windows) surviving.

Does QNX' GUI still exist as from the famed single floppy that booted a networked GUI desktop? I don't remember ever trying it, and don't know what it was like.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

QNX deprecated the Photon GUI framework and replaced it with a new Screen Graphics Subsystem a few years ago.

Here's a WebAssembly QNX 4.05 Demo: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=qnx

QNX is owned by BlacBerry.

> The article is thin on user interfaces. It jumps from a 1940 idea of GUI to Mother of all demos and then to mention some GUIs and OSs from the 80s. AFAIK there were a lot of GUIs during the 80s with only a handful (Macintosh, Amiga, X windows, MS Windows) surviving.

I feel like you didn't read it, despite it not being a long article. It stops at 1980, not '80s. Also it covers Sketchpad, Alto, and PERQ (the latter of which I hadn't heard of) in addition to Memex and the Mother of All Demos. It wouldn't make sense to cover 1980s GUIs when the article explicitly ends in 1980. It's obviously not meant to be a comprehensive history but just a taste of pre '80s GUI history.

> It jumps from a 1940 idea of GUI to Mother of all demos

I think there wasn’t much to show until interactive computing became feasible. The idea of pairing a person and a computer (or time-sharing a computer between multiple users) and provide graphical or direct manipulation interfaces wasn’t there for a long time. IIRC the Linc provided a small CRT that could be controlled by software and kind of beget the PDP-1.

SAGE is missing. Tactical information displays are missing.

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