So you think there's been progress in GUIs since 1981.

Actually, yes... As one example, Jef Raskin pointed out that Click-Drag was an innovation of the Macintosh group (compare to Click-Drag-Click as used by the Star). Also the single button mouse, which while it might have been too far in the one direction, was certainly easier to use for a novice (which everybody was at the time!) than the 3-button Parc brick.

There is more to a GUI than the screenshot, there's also the actions associated with executing operations in the GUI. Consider the PC-GEOS vs. Windows of the time (2.x or 3.x, I think). GEOS was lightning quick, and a good deal of thought had gone into the interfaces for the major tools. The same machine that would run GEOS so sprightly would crawl under the iron heel of Windows. The interfaces looked very similar, but the quality of your interaction with them was entirely different.

So yes, there's been progress -- unfortunately, a lot of it has been backwards!

This in particular: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8...

Love the attention to detail.

mirror: http://s3.amazonaws.com/01981/index.html

...or in speech or gesture recognition. http://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1980/bolt_SIGGRAPH80_...

It's not just GUIs. We're still typing (or cut&paste) into search boxes.