This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection (http://toastytech.com/guis/), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs.
Some feedback:
1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs. A command line interface, for example, is still a user interface, and in fact there has been much diversity of command line interfaces besides Unix and MS-DOS. For example, I remember reading in The Unix Haters Handbook critiques of the Unix shell, comparing it to the CLIs of other operating systems such as VMS. It would have been cool to have learned about the history of various CLIs and how they evolved. Regarding other user interfaces, there are touchscreens and voice, and even among GUIs there have been models that were not heavily influenced by the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, such as Symbolics Genera, Project Oberon, and Plan 9's 8 1/2 and rio GUIs.
2. Some highly influential GUIs are missing. For example, as influential Windows 95's UI was, its look and feel clearly shows influences from NeXTSTEP, the first GUI to introduce the gray, 3D, beveled look that Windows 95 embraced.
I was dumbfounded to find NeXTSTEP missing: it was among the very most influential GUIs in history. Much of 95's UI (and OS/2's UI) were stolen directly from it, and badly, right down to icons.
This page also seems to focus not on UIs, not on GUIs, but just on GUIs for personal computers. No discussion of the tablet->PDA->phone->small device UI evolution at all, even though that UI route has now had profound impact even on laptops. Where's the Newton?
It also misses all the "text GUI" interfaces found on eg. MS-DOS and mainframes. These are super-efficient to navigate and use using just a keyboard, and extremely fast for data entry in comparison to modern systems.
I feel like what you’re describing boils down to a change in priorities for designs and how the user behavior is measured. Today, it seems to be mostly about recording what users do and then endlessly modifying the UI to extract the desired behaviors. This results in these kinds of layouts where a clean choice takes a back seat and user manipulation takes the front.
This is less so the case with actual tools and UI’s used for productivity.
Of course when you look at recordings of user behavior for interfaces you realize how dumb the majority of all users really is. And how without those tiles advertising “Xbox” and “TikTok” those users would probably fail to find those even if they were looking for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You seem to have this assumption that the Windows 11 start bar is made for you. I'm pretty sure the truth is that this menu is intended to drive sales and maximize profits for Microsoft.
Once you have the right set of premises you can see why it behaves this way and the design is actually fairly decent. (Not great, but don't worry, they are improving it every release)
I agree. Win 95/98 UI was pretty ugly, but it was consistent and followed a good design language: eg everything that was clickable looked like a button: buttons, table headers, scroll bars etc. Once you learned the basics of the UI, you could mostly figure things out.
Nowadays buttons look like plain text labels half the time and every app has its own inconsistent style and even I, someone who has used computers for a long time and use them daily, sometimes have trouble seeing what’s what on a UI.
> I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs.
This. I miss the practicality of these designs. It feels like designers today make changes to justify having work to do to maintain their jobs, and don't actually care about user experience, and in fact many are actively user hostile (see 'dark patterns').
Same thing has happened with Ubuntu Desktop/GNOME. I used to know where things were. Now it wants you to just click Activities and type in your search (for an Application, Setting, etc).
Settings is the gear above the "power" icon? The apps at the top of my start menu are ones that were most recently installed. TBH 95% of the time I just type in the name anyway.
After you hit Start, just start typing the name of the app you want to run. You don't need to hunt for it in the menu.
Don't worry if there isn't a text box to type into, or if the text box at the top of the menu isn't selected. You don't need to click on it, just start typing. This has worked ever since Windows 7 (or maybe Vista).
For bonus points, try to visit from a smartphone. a few scrolls into the page, I got a modal begging me to subscribe and it was not closable - positioned too high so I didn't get to the x to close it, I guess.
Ironic - a website about user interfaces has a UI so bad that I could but glimpse the content.
The list is kind of arbitrary. I don't feel the Amiga UI had any influence on anything what so ever. I was a huge Amiga fan and owned an Amiga 1000 the year it launched and then an Amiga 500 later but other than Amiga's unique multi-resolution system, which really was only something that was a product of the limits of old hardware, there was nothing special about its UX.
There was one difference between Amiga and Mac/Windows that was noticeable on the slow machines of the day: It was more responsive.
Not only did Amiga have preemptive multitasking. The window system ("Intuition") ran behaviour and redraw of apps' widgets in its own task, making them responsive even if the apps owning them were lagging.
Compare that to Windows 3.11 of the day, where the entire GUI would hang while waiting for an app to redraw anything in one of its windows.
I agree - given the Amiga's excellent hardware capabilities for the time, the GUI lacked quite a bit, of course especially compared to the Mac, but even in comparison to GEM.
That is, even in the context of desktop graphical UIs I expected Englebart's oN-Line System (NLS), Sutherland's Sketchpad, X Windows, NeWS, and/or NeXTStep.
Broaden that and there's smartphone UIs.
Or Raskin's The Humane Environment (THE).
EDIT: OPEN LOOK tried to "fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar" long before KDE 1.0. There's also the Common Desktop Environment.
minor nit - this is a very poorly named site. A better name might be "the history of workstation and personal computer graphical user interfaces", a very far cry from blanket coverage of all "user interfaces".
Even foregoing simple UI such as the handle of a hammer, or even the mechanical interfaces of yesteryear such as the differences between a Curta calculator and the original Burroughs adding machine, or a Jacquard loom and so forth...
Limiting ourselves to just binary digital computers we're still missing a lot at this site. IBM 1401 card punch machines... the IBM 360 operator console... the VAX DCL, the original UNIX sh, etc., etc.
Minor nitpick: The "Alto GUI" is really Smalltalk, there was no such thing as a general GUI for the Alto. Also, image 10/10 is a screenshot of the Xerox Star.
(The merits of Xerox SDD in turning the experimental odds and ends of Alto developments into a consistent user interface are generally underappreciated.)
The KDE 1 task manager looks _very_ similar to the Windows NT 4 task manager (from the mid nineties): https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40 (scroll down to 'task manager' and click the faint tab control marked '3' in the upper left of the specific screen shot)
Until Win10, the NT OSes had that same basic task manager with the cool looking green graphs. WinNT 3.51 had a much more crude looking task manager
The Windows 95 icons were so good. I'm comparing those to what I see in Windows 10 and it's kind of funny. Examples I think are much worse: Keyboard, Mouse, Accessibility Options/Ease Of Access, Network, Passwords/Credential Manager. What happened?
> I'd love to see GEM, Canon Cat, NeXTSTEP, and BeOS here
That would be good. I'd also like to see something that's at a much lower level, basically an catalog of specific ways of accomplishing specific basic tasks in a particular UI, current or historical. I've switched between different OSes, and each time I sorely miss some very particular thing (e.g. Windows' very useful line-based Home/End key behavior vs. Mac OS's totally pointless document-based behavior). I'm sure even dead-end OS's had very good ideas like these that have been subsequently lost.
My weird dream is that some day someone could use a catalog like that to combine all the best ideas into something that's as close to perfect as possible.
I generally avoid slipping in overt promotion of my book [1], but this cries out for it. Find out how it really went down, what the debates were like, and what it was like to be there.
This is a quickie, copy-and-paste job from publicly available sources. Mostly accurate, except for calling the Alto keyset "the Alto keyboard." As some of the comments point out, it's quite incomplete.
My user experience on this site: scroll to cool picture, click cool picture, click back button expecting to go back to text. Back button takes me back to hacker news, urgh. Click link to site again, scroll to where I was. Click next cool picture and forget that back is broken. Click back. Urgh! Actually I've tried to use the back button four times now and I guess it's best if I just don't finish reading the site.
My first reaction is that it is disappointing that GUIs haven't changed all that much from Xerox.
However, on second thought, how different is the user interface on a car from the 30s from a modern car? So maybe it isn't surprising that the GUI hasn't radically changed
> how different is the user interface on a car from the 30s from a modern car
A lot I would say, even on a much smaller time scale.
The features are completely different besides the very basic odometers which anyway look very different and present much different information. A modern car not only has much more features, but even the way of consuming the old ones is radically different, and not just because of the switch from analog to digital, e.g. steering wheels have seen a massive amount of analog buttons and levers.
There's only so much efficiency and clarity that can be squeezed out of a GUI.
Familiarity and consistency are themselves powerful elements of UI/UX.
Upshot: stop fucking with the interface.
Apple, renowned for design, has essentially only ever offered two GUIs, "Classic Mac" (1984--1999) and "Aqua" (1999--2022) Note that the second has been in use longer than Classic, by over 60% (23/16 ~= 1.64).
Good UIs don't change.
Apple have tweaked at the edges, changed some of the styling and colours, and added features (e.g., workspaces / virtual desktops). But a user of the Classic Mac could sit down at a modern OSX system and figure it put pretty quickly.
(I'm actually not a fan of the interface, though I generally use one based on a precursor / ancestor of it, WindowMaker, based on NeXTStep from the NeXT Machine.)
Browsing 1992 through 1995 gave me tears. Btw, where is Vista, ME, or Windows 98, or 7 for that matter? Vista had an especially unique UI with Aero and Windows 7 was an adaptation of that I believe.
Non-inclusion of Vista is really strange given how influential it was.
I used to be among those Linux users that wanted to make the GUI look cool™. I spent a LOT of time browsing gnome-look.org and at the height of Vista popularity, the Aero knockoffs were everywhere.
I concur about Windows Vista. For all the criticism that OS received, it did bring Windows a compositing desktop similar to Mac OS X, which was a crucial milestone to the GUI experience, which brought compositing desktops to more than 90% of personal computer users.
I believe Windows 98 and ME were omitted because this is largely a presentation of the evolution of GUIs. Windows 98 and ME did not substantially differ from Windows 95 in terms of their look-and-feel; the same can be said about Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000.
Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) really needs a representation of the brushed metal appearance in the image gallery. (There had been two presentation styles, the general one seen in the images, and a brushed metal one for utilities.)
Hi author! Cool site. It was odd getting a "hi hacker news would you like to subscribe to my UI mailing list", but OK. But it was really not great seeing this [0] when I clicked "no", given the whole thing is about UI.
[+] [-] linguae|3 years ago|reply
Some feedback:
1. All interfaces presented were graphical user interfaces for desktop personal computers. However, there's a wide world of user interfaces for computers beyond conventional point-and-click GUIs. A command line interface, for example, is still a user interface, and in fact there has been much diversity of command line interfaces besides Unix and MS-DOS. For example, I remember reading in The Unix Haters Handbook critiques of the Unix shell, comparing it to the CLIs of other operating systems such as VMS. It would have been cool to have learned about the history of various CLIs and how they evolved. Regarding other user interfaces, there are touchscreens and voice, and even among GUIs there have been models that were not heavily influenced by the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, such as Symbolics Genera, Project Oberon, and Plan 9's 8 1/2 and rio GUIs.
2. Some highly influential GUIs are missing. For example, as influential Windows 95's UI was, its look and feel clearly shows influences from NeXTSTEP, the first GUI to introduce the gray, 3D, beveled look that Windows 95 embraced.
[+] [-] SeanLuke|3 years ago|reply
This page also seems to focus not on UIs, not on GUIs, but just on GUIs for personal computers. No discussion of the tablet->PDA->phone->small device UI evolution at all, even though that UI route has now had profound impact even on laptops. Where's the Newton?
[+] [-] rwmj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on.
All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox.
Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want to find the programs and settings I'm looking for.
I'm not even sure if can get to setting from the start bar anymore, and if I'm looking for the programs I've installed it's behind another click.
I guess it looks nice with all the tiles and transition effects though.
[+] [-] scyzoryk_xyz|3 years ago|reply
This is less so the case with actual tools and UI’s used for productivity.
Of course when you look at recordings of user behavior for interfaces you realize how dumb the majority of all users really is. And how without those tiles advertising “Xbox” and “TikTok” those users would probably fail to find those even if they were looking for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] kevincox|3 years ago|reply
You seem to have this assumption that the Windows 11 start bar is made for you. I'm pretty sure the truth is that this menu is intended to drive sales and maximize profits for Microsoft.
Once you have the right set of premises you can see why it behaves this way and the design is actually fairly decent. (Not great, but don't worry, they are improving it every release)
[+] [-] dkersten|3 years ago|reply
Nowadays buttons look like plain text labels half the time and every app has its own inconsistent style and even I, someone who has used computers for a long time and use them daily, sometimes have trouble seeing what’s what on a UI.
[+] [-] Ansil849|3 years ago|reply
This. I miss the practicality of these designs. It feels like designers today make changes to justify having work to do to maintain their jobs, and don't actually care about user experience, and in fact many are actively user hostile (see 'dark patterns').
[+] [-] irusensei|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|3 years ago|reply
Actually using it was a pain because it was so unstable, if only it had been combined with a proper preemptive multitasking OS.
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizofaus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|3 years ago|reply
Don't worry if there isn't a text box to type into, or if the text box at the top of the menu isn't selected. You don't need to click on it, just start typing. This has worked ever since Windows 7 (or maybe Vista).
[+] [-] hunterb123|3 years ago|reply
You can turn off recommendations, remove the default apps, add any other app including settings, set the size, etc.
Once you spend a couple minutes setting it up, it's less cluttered than any previous Windows OS.
[+] [-] sedan_baklazhan|3 years ago|reply
Scrolling to see more content fading in is such a bad UI practice. Completely negating all the natural reading experience.
[+] [-] mngnt|3 years ago|reply
Ironic - a website about user interfaces has a UI so bad that I could but glimpse the content.
[+] [-] floren|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdfjkl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IYasha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asiachick|3 years ago|reply
Similarly where's GEM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)
I'm sure there's a bunch of others missing for "The History of User Interfaces"
[+] [-] Findecanor|3 years ago|reply
Not only did Amiga have preemptive multitasking. The window system ("Intuition") ran behaviour and redraw of apps' widgets in its own task, making them responsive even if the apps owning them were lagging. Compare that to Windows 3.11 of the day, where the entire GUI would hang while waiting for an app to redraw anything in one of its windows.
[+] [-] Cockbrand|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eesmith|3 years ago|reply
That is, even in the context of desktop graphical UIs I expected Englebart's oN-Line System (NLS), Sutherland's Sketchpad, X Windows, NeWS, and/or NeXTStep.
Broaden that and there's smartphone UIs.
Or Raskin's The Humane Environment (THE).
EDIT: OPEN LOOK tried to "fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar" long before KDE 1.0. There's also the Common Desktop Environment.
[+] [-] memetomancer|3 years ago|reply
Even foregoing simple UI such as the handle of a hammer, or even the mechanical interfaces of yesteryear such as the differences between a Curta calculator and the original Burroughs adding machine, or a Jacquard loom and so forth...
Limiting ourselves to just binary digital computers we're still missing a lot at this site. IBM 1401 card punch machines... the IBM 360 operator console... the VAX DCL, the original UNIX sh, etc., etc.
[+] [-] yreg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|3 years ago|reply
(The merits of Xerox SDD in turning the experimental odds and ends of Alto developments into a consistent user interface are generally underappreciated.)
[+] [-] Anthony-G|3 years ago|reply
1. The MS Windows 7 Task Manager look very similar to the KDE 1 version (from the late nineties): https://history.user-interface.io/img/kde-1/task-manager.jpe...
2. In 1990, Microsoft referred to plain text files on the local system as “on-line documents”: https://history.user-interface.io/img/windows-3.0/notepad.pn...
[+] [-] memetomancer|3 years ago|reply
Until Win10, the NT OSes had that same basic task manager with the cool looking green graphs. WinNT 3.51 had a much more crude looking task manager
[+] [-] Narishma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floren|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aimor|3 years ago|reply
Windows 95: https://history.user-interface.io/img/windows-95/settings.pn...
Windows 10: https://i.ibb.co/SQkQNJw/Windows10.png
[+] [-] beefman|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
[+] [-] tablespoon|3 years ago|reply
That would be good. I'd also like to see something that's at a much lower level, basically an catalog of specific ways of accomplishing specific basic tasks in a particular UI, current or historical. I've switched between different OSes, and each time I sorely miss some very particular thing (e.g. Windows' very useful line-based Home/End key behavior vs. Mac OS's totally pointless document-based behavior). I'm sure even dead-end OS's had very good ideas like these that have been subsequently lost.
My weird dream is that some day someone could use a catalog like that to combine all the best ideas into something that's as close to perfect as possible.
[+] [-] sys_64738|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
This is a quickie, copy-and-paste job from publicly available sources. Mostly accurate, except for calling the Alto keyset "the Alto keyboard." As some of the comments point out, it's quite incomplete.
[1] https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future
[+] [-] b06timmer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbecue|3 years ago|reply
The back of the internet is broken...
Very cool site though.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
A lot I would say, even on a much smaller time scale.
The features are completely different besides the very basic odometers which anyway look very different and present much different information. A modern car not only has much more features, but even the way of consuming the old ones is radically different, and not just because of the switch from analog to digital, e.g. steering wheels have seen a massive amount of analog buttons and levers.
2002 Mercedes Benz E class interior[1]
2022 Mercedes Benz E class interior[2]
[1] https://autotech-miami.com/images/watermarked/3039zg.jpg
[2] https://imgcdn.zigwheels.my/large/gallery/interior/17/481/me...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
There's only so much efficiency and clarity that can be squeezed out of a GUI.
Familiarity and consistency are themselves powerful elements of UI/UX.
Upshot: stop fucking with the interface.
Apple, renowned for design, has essentially only ever offered two GUIs, "Classic Mac" (1984--1999) and "Aqua" (1999--2022) Note that the second has been in use longer than Classic, by over 60% (23/16 ~= 1.64).
Good UIs don't change.
Apple have tweaked at the edges, changed some of the styling and colours, and added features (e.g., workspaces / virtual desktops). But a user of the Classic Mac could sit down at a modern OSX system and figure it put pretty quickly.
(I'm actually not a fan of the interface, though I generally use one based on a precursor / ancestor of it, WindowMaker, based on NeXTStep from the NeXT Machine.)
[+] [-] Oarch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IYasha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egfx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mngnt|3 years ago|reply
I used to be among those Linux users that wanted to make the GUI look cool™. I spent a LOT of time browsing gnome-look.org and at the height of Vista popularity, the Aero knockoffs were everywhere.
[+] [-] linguae|3 years ago|reply
I believe Windows 98 and ME were omitted because this is largely a presentation of the evolution of GUIs. Windows 98 and ME did not substantially differ from Windows 95 in terms of their look-and-feel; the same can be said about Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000.
[+] [-] sligor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memetomancer|3 years ago|reply
https://guidebookgallery.org/guis
This seems much more comprehensive, has screenshots of specific UI elements and controls to view different tabs within those screenshots.
[+] [-] masswerk|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Interestingly, there's no representative image of this to be found in image searches, but here's a screenshot of a third party tool: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.infor...
[+] [-] joaomoreno|3 years ago|reply
0: https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/wH0ONKrFlqSI.png?o=1