The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

Actually, before the Mac there was the Lisa. Before the Lisa, there was the Star. I’d mention the Alto, but the idea of a desktop with icons wasn’t there. The Star had them, but was even more expensive than the Lisa (and had a very clunky mouse/keyboard manipulation flow).

It’s also not a steady progression from the command-line to the GUI – command-lines have been present throughout computing history and even made a comeback to Apple when NeXT’s OS became the base of OSX. Command lines, as cryptic as they may appear to the uninitiated (and, quite frankly, MS-DOS didn’t make them look good – or expressive, only cryptic), are immensely powerful. They have been since the 70′s and continue progressing to this day (albeit, far from the eyes of the more casual computer users).

Also, the original Mac was largely a market failure – and had little impact on user interactions for a long time. It took years for it to dethrone Apple’s original hit, the Apple II line, as Apple’s cash-cow.