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Revolutionary User Interfaces

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13 pointsmichael_fine8 comments

Things got quite Apple-centric near the end there. I don't doubt Apple has been responsible for a huge number of innovations recently in user interfaces, but there's some notable omissions like gesture recognition and motion sensing (via the Wii and XBox 360), and crediting Siri with the invention or even popularization of speech recognition is one of the bigger stretches I've heard recently. Dragon Dictate would probably be a natural fit for an early popularizer of that technology.

1963: Ivan Sutherland developed "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System" in his thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs [1]

1969: The Genesys system, developed by Dr. Ron Baecker in MIT's Lincoln Laboratory was one of the world's first interactive systems for real-time animation [2]

1980: Richard A. Bolt from MIT wrote Put-that-there : voice and gesture at the graphics interface [3]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZYslfBpC10

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pr2KIPQOKE

There are a few important missings. Just to point one, the Googles's original UI was as revolutionary as many of the examples here.

Given there are missing things, but what do you mean by google ui? A search box?

I mean the spartan user interface approach the followed in the early 2000s in their core product.

We give for granted now that applications should be clean, focus, etc, but for many years that was not the trend. To put it into perspective, its major rivals at the time (Yahoo, and MSN) followed the opposite path.

Google had a huge impact on how web interfaces are done today.

They also popularize ajax when they launched gmail but that its another story.

Ironcially, I can remember Yahoo being lauded very early on for the same thing (spartan user interface, insanely fast load times, etc.) back when it started.

If anything, Google was a return back to spartan interfaces after the initial batch of search engines got too caught up in portal mania.

Actually that UI was first popularized by Altavista

There are many, easily correctable errors. The Univac isn't called Unicvac. The Osborne 1 wasn't available in 1976 but 1981. Microsoft windows was released in 1985, not 1982. Speech recognition was available with Dragon Dictate in 1994 or so.

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