History of the Graphical User Interface: The Rise (and Fall?) Of WIMP Design
uxtigers.com
uxtigers.com
He is dearly in need of an editor. There's probably some useful insight in there somewhere, but his writing is way too long and absolutely full of every type of AI generated media (even including cringe music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WDK-YYbLYg).
It's sad to see.
It is also noteworthy that even at the height of WIMP era lot of user interaction was driven by keyboard shortcuts, arguably even more than these days. In many ways WIMP was training wheels instead of the primary interaction model.
AI images in general are a red flag in articles, but these ones additionally push me to go elsewhere for information.
> (I made all the comics in this article with Nano Banana Pro.)
I don't see any strong evidence for the article being AI-written, however. Given the author, I would be very disappointed if it were.
At least he says it I guess. But it was clearly slop pictures from the first one. I already knew before I read it.
Blogs everywhere are now going hard on this. It is not endearing.
Examples of bad areas include the Menu Bar superhero (garbled text), and the keyboards (some nonsense numpads).
In fact I suspect "world models" may let us re-experience some idiocy from yesteryear we thought we had put behind us, like [1]. Can't wait to go "shopping" in a "world model" of a store again! However do I survive in 2026 merely zipping around the store buying my favorite items off of my favorite's list as fast as I can think of the items and using search on the thousands of available items rather than WASD'ing my way through a "model" of the store.
By contrast I think the browser is undersold. GUI toolkits existed before browsers, but they were all based on widget layouts. That is, the top level of the widget hierarchy would be some layout engine, which had components, which had subcomponents, which had a widget, etc. Some were more dynamic and relative, some used a lot of absolute positioning, but they were all structured in this way. Browsers introduced a new paradigm, where textual layout was the "top level" of the tree, and the widgets all fit within that. Prior to a browser, a Mad Lib-style game where you have text boxes interspersed in a bunch of text was quite difficult. Many GUI toolkits would have required an individual absolutely-laid-out pane for each game you want to play because it couldn't do its own layout on interspersed text and widgets at all; most if not all of them (perhaps Tk excepted, though I'm not familiar with what it could do in the 1990s as I picked it up later) would have made heavy weather of it if they could do it. (Although GUIs made heavy weather of things in general before browsers.) Now all the GUI toolkits have a lot more support for textual-layout like browsers and of course the browsers have carried on like crazy.
AIs-running-in-browsers seem a very powerful paradigm to continue forward with.
With regard to the "world model" I would see "augmented reality" being the major move forward there. It has consistently failed for a long time but I think there's a very plausible case to be made that it was just premature tech, that it doesn't work without the powerful AIs that only recently came out and are still pretty hard to stuff on to a realtime platform. That will start to enable some very interesting UI paradigms here at some point. But that still really doesn't replace WIMPs, it's more a new frontier entirely. Again, I don't necessarily want to "use augmented reality" to text my wife. AR may prompt for it in some particular circumstance, but if I'm originating one out of the blue I'm going to use a conventional UI to do that, not try to wrangle AR into it.