Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009

Wow…
Algunos ni los habia sentido nombrar !!!
Saludos,
Gabriel

Hell yeah, awesome timeline. Retro interfaces rock

hahahahah! I remember that chess img and paintbrush. Old school to the max right there.

HAHAH, great Post,
THE most amaizing is that my grand parents still use 16 year old PC with Windows 3.11 to run their small company.
I don’t know how come the computer still works. even the hard drive never failed.

Things have really come a long way in the last 3 decades.

apple os x leopard interface rocks, much more cleanner than vista and still more slick.

nice

Looks like Microsoft was pwning visually with Windows 95 until 2001 when Mac OS X dropped IMO. After that windows remained relatively the same. Visually Vista just looks like eye candy but with less functionality than OS X. Hopefully Windows 7 packs some more usefulness besides what’s been revealed so far because Vista is already relatively solid performance wise for me.

Pretty cool evolution:) great post:)

Those bring back memories! Although it does seem unquestioned that the window model is the best we can do, I don’t quite see how overlapping windows and having to move them about the desktop has ever been useful. I always work in everything full screen, although I suppose a tiling window manager might be useful.

Somewhere in the beginning I think there was something called GEM by digital research if my mempry does not fail me

Am I right?

I know I’m going to get burned for this… But I think all the improvements after Windows 95 are cosmetic more than anything..

I would be perfectly satisfied with a Win 95 machine today.. (imagine how fast it would run.. assuming that it could run on multi-core 64-bit systems)

Wow, just wow. I’m looking at IRIX 3 and Next and I’m thinking “Jeez, it looks like it took everyone else 5 years just to catch up to these.” Visually at least.

Woaw… thanks for this awesome post… *nostalgy*

Wow! Amazing how the GUI design has dramatically improved in less than 30 years! The oldest I’ve ever used here is the Windows 3.1 one.

Don’t mind guys, but it’d be rather nice if you cared to include KDE 4 too. Really nice timeline, but without KDE 4, one tends to think that OSS interfaces are really backward, though in my view they aren’t so much.
You’ve even missed out on updating Gnome to 2.24. Do I see an anti-OSS bias here?? Just kidding; really amazing collection nevertheless.

I wanted to write sth like this as well. But obviously you are quick. Also you could include something more about Windows 7. I had collected the logos for all versions of Windows as well which you didn’t mention in this.

nice article, but why end with leopard, what about KDE 4.2? also what happened to gnome?

I am sure that the Amiga had “preemtive multitasking”, not “primitive multitasking” as stated here. Se preemption at Wikipedia.

OS9?

That’s really cool to see! Very complete article, the interfaces came a long way. Can’t wait for the future!

WHOW!!!! Great list of GUI History!!!

Awesome what happened in the past 25 Years!

Wow I so remember all this from watching my dad work when I was a kid hahaha!! Thank God for evolution… I sincerely admire my dad for even being able to work in such conditions!! :p

and kde4???

Amazing list.. everyone who uses a computer must see this!

I’d started using computer by starting MS Dos and currently I’m satisfied by Windows XP; I don’t like the new windows vista which is very resource hungry.

Great post, but where is “PARDUS” (Turkish national operating system)

Where’s KDE 4.2? I’m guessing that it puts others to shame and therefore wasn’t included

http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/

You missed Mac OS 9, which was a comparable difference between 8 and X.

Some of the older interface color combos gave me quite a headache X-p

Very interesting time line, thanks!

Amazing post. But I’m missing KDE 4 screens.

Mac OS 9?

Where’s the 2009 Desktop Environments for Linux?

Surely this wouldn’t be complete without the latest version of Gnome or at least KDE 4 which is a completely new revision of KDE.
A mention of Compiz would also fit nicely here in advancements in user interfaces.

I remember them all.(sigh)
ah to be young again- with not even a calculator in sight.

A fascinating post! It’s amazing that you acquired all of these great images!

No RISC OS? (1988 – 2008)

Irix is a Unix operating system made by SGI – not a graphical user interface
Irix can run X Windows (which is what you are showing) and any Window Manager on top of it (there are lots, OpenStep, E, etc…)
Same can be said for Solaris and Linux and FreeBSD
You left out Compiz/Beryl, Looking Glass and a lot of other GUIs too

Nice — but no RISC OS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS

I remember playing the chess game!!

One of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a very long time!!

For those of you saying “OS9?”

Its was the version release between Apple OS 8 and Apple OS X (X actually is pronounced Ten, its a roman numeral), anyways upon the release of OS X Apple redubbed OS 9 as Classic. There were a lot of graphical changes between 8 and 9, colorization really started there.

nice list – you could have also included BeOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS)

Kinda miss the Apple GS OS
And Atari TOS and GEM..

First time i learn computer is using DOS. is it not an OS interface? coz it not in the list.

One comment regarding the Amiga:

It’s multitasking capacities were hardly primitive. The Amiga had fully pre-emptive mulltitasking, and it was the first “home OS” which had this feature. All other computers at that time had cooperative multitasking (one application freezes and the entire system freezes). PCs eventually caught up when Windows NT was introduced (8 years later), and in the case of Macs they had to wait a full 15 years before they had this capacity widely available to its users.

What about later GNOME releases?

Also, I’m pretty sure the screenshot for IRIX was not for the release version in 1986. It probably reflects that found in 1990. This gives a skewed representation of how GUI evolved.

1986 – 1990
IRIX 3 (released in 1986, first release 1984)

Soft, warm nostalgic feelings about windows 3.11…

Very cool blog post!

Its neat to see how things started and then improved each release. I have to say that Apple has the best user interface yet…..and I have never owned a Mac at all! I plan on getting one this summer (Mac Book Pro).

you mention that NeXSTEP eventually evolved into OPENSTEP. that’s accurate, but you forgot to mention that from OPENSTEP, it further evolved into Mac OS X. the vast majority of the classes we use in both the AppKit and Foundation frameworks in Mac OS X are the same as those that were used for NeXTSTEP. even the class names remain, for instance, the string class is still named NSString in Mac OS X. Save for those using deprecated classes, anything written for NeXTSTEP using AppKit or Foundation is source compatible with Mac OS X and even GnuSTEP. Try that with Windows 3.11 and Windows 7.

some of the apps from NeXTSTEP also made it to Mac OS X, like TextEdit, Mail.app and Terminal.app.

NeXTSTEP was so far ahead of it’s time when it was first released, and now, 19 years later, is still one of the more advanced operating systems available.

How about a little mention of BeOS’s GUI (or ZETAs, Be’s former successor)?

I think that GUI encompasses some ideas of modern design in addition to simplicity and customization .

Very nice to see OS interfaces from old days!

Why have you left out the Graphical Environment Manager ?? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager

Ah… the memories. Excellent timeline, great to see those retro interfaces again. Left out BeOS and the later iterations of GNOME, though, and the shameless sucking up to apple in the latter end was unnecessary, but on the whole quite enjoyable.

Also, reddit says ‘Hi.’

Wow…. This blog entry brings back lots of memories. (Some of them pretty unpleasant. haha)

cool. do you guys still have this retro OS?

Nice simple and brief information.

Thank you.

OS X Tiger should have been included to fill the gap from the whole stagnation between the XP through the Vista (2001-2007) years

Woah..!!
brought back old memories dating back to windows 3.0..
I still remember how much we would be struggling and getting excited over small drawings in mspaint dating a couple of decades before…
and now it is so much better…and look at the progress now …within 20 years so much changed..

No mention of UI’s in cell phones and netbooks that have evolved with time. That would make an interesting addition to the article.

Please guys, don’t confuse operating systems with graphical user interfaces.

The article is all about the MAJOR GUI advances, and as I tried to emphasize in the beginning of this article that it won’t cover the whole range of GUIs from start to finish.

Read the source article of the IRIX 3 screenshot. It’s IRIX 6.5 from 1998.

Here’s a pic of IRIX 3.x for you:
http://home.arcor.de/gerhard.lenerz/images/Screenshots/irix-3.3-img2.gif

Great post!
The only thing missing is Gnome 2.x
Gnome has improved since 1.0!

Nice try but as have been pointed out you missed few. GEOS for c64 should be there. Not very usable but graphical none the less. Also Evolution, XFCE and later Amiga OS’s (3 and 4 series) should be there.

Wonderful Compilation of the OS UIs. Really, it took me a long journey back in time when I saw the First GUI OS of my life (Win’98). Later I got introduced to Win 3.1, Win 95, Win NT 4.0 and then to Linux UIs (Suse, Redhat and then some other versions) within my College days itself.

Thanks for this voyage through history.. I especially liked the Amiga OS 2 part.. since it was my first computer.

Dude, you forgot geOS for the commodore 64.

And where is Gnome 2?

Worth noting: KDE and Gnome Desktop environments are extremely customizable, and there are TONS of better looking UI desings for them than the plain old OoB looks. To me that’s what makes them better. You can play mix and match between window frame decorations and controls skins.

The Amiga had “primitive multitasking”? I guess you mean it didn’t have memory protection, but that was because the 68k didn’t have a memory management unit. It’s multitasking was not primitive – it was preemptive for instance, while Mac OS was cooperative, and that only changed when Mac OS X came out ~15 years later.

And then later you say of Workbench 2.04:

“Many improvements were made to this version of the GUI. The desktop could be divided vertically into screens of different resolutions and color depths, which nowadays seems a little odd. The default resolution of Workbench was 640×256, but the hardware supported larger resolutions too.”

All of those features already existed in the original version of Workbench. (The most obvious change was the colour scheme and the 3D look, but they also added ARexx and rewrote it from BCPL to C.)

The IRIX screenshot is 5.5 or 6.0 – its not the earlier IRIX (it even has Gimp in the screenshot which is a giveaway).

Early IRIX looked like this:

http://home.arcor.de/gerhard.lenerz/images/Screenshots/irix-3.3-img2.gif

one of the more innovative GUI’s in that era without a doubt. Also, IRIX is a complete OS, not just a GUI.

A really nice presentation that tour us through Desktop computer evolution. It was such a sweat tour.
Thanks.
God speed to Human race!

Really awesome again post !! Remember yours OS, excellent…

Very nice. I miss Acorn Risc OS gui there, though.
http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-riscos.htm

Seriously, no way is the pic in the article IRIX from the ’80s. It looks like it’s running WindowMaker, which wasn’t released until ‘97. It shows CUPS, which didn’t exist until ‘99. And it mentions OpenGL, not released until ‘92.

very nice, interesting how the OS GUI has evolved over time in a relatively short space of time.

my grandfather used windows 3.1 up to last year when he got ubuntu. ive still got a copy of windows 3.1 on stiffys, can you believe it .

perhaps it would be fun to look at how CLI OSs evolved sometime

Nice post, thanks!

But… Where are my MSX and Basic??? I supose they are not here… because they have no design!

The Amiga had PREEMPTIVE multitasking, you cretin. For gosh sakes, what a stupid error.

And no one with an Amiga kept their workbench like that. We all ran MagicWB or the like.

Awesome post…great to see the change in appearance and functinality over the years.

Hey what about GEOS for the Commadore 64?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

I remember in the 90’s when my ancient pc died and i’d lent my apple classic to someone i had to trawl out the C64 with GEOS to type up a project. I hadn’t thought of that for years until just now..

Russ

What about the GEM?

Guess you missed Compiz!

Great, great article. I never realized some of the interfaces from the 80’s had a pretty good look.

Ok, I looked twice and did not see Windows 2000 or NT. Perhaps it is embedded in the XP listing?

KDE4 is so Beautiful, love it

What about win2k? I love it!

I think I see your point in this article. I was about to flame you for not including X-windows if you mentioned KDE, but you were specific to KDE4. KDE4 is driven by QT. So, I get it now. It’s a classic RTFA. However, I sort of question the MS Windows mention in this context. The earlier versions ran on top of DOS from what I understand. I guess it doesn’t really matter, it’s a good article to compare the differences between the GUIs too.

what no BeOS love??? guess everyone’s forgotten it…

I agree Gyorgy.

I see you have included no UNIX GUI as Motif, CDE, OpenWin, …
This way, it looks as UNIX has never had GUI.

Me thinks you missed Amiga 3.0, BeOS, Commodore GeOS… And BTW Amgia was preemtive and mutliprocessor. Its a cool stroll, but kinda light on substance and how before windows dominated – advances went much much faster. Look how a different GUI came out just about each year – and each one was much improved over the previous ones…. with the MS monopoly – that’s all but been wiped out.

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that I was blissfully unaware of the advancements in the Unix world back in the mid eighties.

I’m just old enough remember the command-line days before GUI.

Great post.

Wow that was a nice resource ..
I have written an article few days ago about the Windows Operating System since 1985.
http://www.pickmore.com/microsoft/microsoft-windows-10-to-windows-seven-journey-1969

Don’t forget to throw a modern Gnome in the last section. Through Ubuntu, that’s the desktop that most Linux users are seeing lately.

WHERE THE HELL IS PC GEOS OR GEOWORKS 2.0?

I miss OS/2. It was the best of the best, a decade ahead of every other system. WHy oh why did IBM kill it?

You did not include GEOS (Graphic Environment Opertating System) for the Commodore.

Awesome timeline. The time and effort put into this article is amazing and it shows! Unfortunately I believe Microsoft blew it with Vista. Too much eye candy which bogged the system down. Still keeping XP!

The whole thing completely skips over GS/OS for the Apple //gs

I’m not sure how you could have made that error.

I agree with Rijandael. OS/2 Warp was everything XP has and then some, 5 years ahead of XP and half the hardware requirement. I used both NeXTSTEP and OS/2 Warp would prefer either to Windows anything…

197? – CPM Power
1980? – QNX
198? – rusian Miss for PDP-11
1982 – Lotus
1984 – X11
198? – DR-DOS Deskview

Best thing I’ve read for some time. Definetly was worth it.

Totally false. Windows NT was the firs with the “Start” button.

And where is Windows 98 ?

Top5 by me:

1. Leopard
2. Vista
3. KDE4
4. Tiger
5. KDE3

KDE SUCKS

IRIX 3 and the first picture are totally wrong

nice collection, OS’ have definitely come a long way

y gmome? por que no se muestra las ultimas versiones?????

Great work! Well done!

You seem to have forgotten the Atari OS’s. TOS operating system that ran GEM on top as a GUI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS

1. you left out the Zune
the best OS every made for any device, especially the one that comes in brown!
Zune forever (glad I got that tattoo)

2. you left out GEM by Digital Research that ran on DOS, I loved it and it had GEM Draw which was a great early vector drawing app!
http://toastytech.com/guis/gem311about.png

3. you left out Solaris on X Windows!

wow….i like it…

Hello everybody,I come from china,I’m waiting for windows 7.

Genial, yo empecé con el windows 3.1, venía del ms2. Me llama la atención como se ha evolucionado en pocos años.

Try to look at the GUI evolution as a big picture and not broken down for every platform than you can see the article makes sense and you’ll realize that why some of the GUIs were left out.

(Microsoft = intento de copiar a APPLE)*a lo largo de la historia.

Great post! I miss my Commodore 64

“The desktop could be divided vertically into screens of different resolutions and color depths” Tha’s true for Workbench 1.0 either!

Nice pics, old school

Well. And where is Oberon?

There was the system called, maybe, Frameworks (for DOS). It was approx. in 1986-1990.

You definitely missed out one major one that had a lot of influence in the way we use computers today. RISC OS, by Acorn. It’s the Drag and Drop stuff that RISC OS did that made it a real joy to use. And the taskbar, and the system tray – they all lend their thanks to RISC OS.

My $0.02.

Where is Atari?

Things really change a lot… Let’s image how people thinking changed during this time…

KDE4.0 release 11 January 2008, not January(2009) plz fix

Where is Syllable and AtheOS??!
Whithout it this review is not full!

Thanks. So cool looking at all these screens. Thanks for creating this info. Very excellent work and very informative.

wow, great list! looking forward to seeing what the next 20 years hold in terms of OS UI.

I like it. Nostalgia…

Wow. Windows 1.0 actually looked oool and since that it has become more and more ugly and wasting your CPU power on a idiotic and very anti elegant look.

Very nice and useful post, liked this.

Bravo! Thanks for this anazing interface tour!

GS/OS?

Real Great job! Congratulations and thanks.

M

Just my own opinion. That’s so “cool” to put your ass on the computer a start an another holy war about what’s best – *nix or win etc. But if you clear your understanding about “best” OS and look at those pictures, you will see hidden detailes. Personally, what i have seen in those GUI’s. Since 70’s to mid 80’s Xerox GUI was innovate and UNTOUCH solution for most other that will born in corporations
like Apple. Look at first Apple OS screen – similarity is FULL (of course, because they copied Xerox GUI works, I know). Than look at first windows’ – they are different. Just look! Much more than other!!! Look clearly! IMHO interface is a bit more user-friendly. But, OK. Than, a new revolution of “GUI works” I see in NEXTSTEP. Repeat it -just look to previous GUI’s and compare with NEXTSTEP. My english is bad, so i can’t find much more words to detail clearly my opinion, sorry. But next, OK, look at win95. Another revolution! New, most user-friendly and logical interface! Just look at
any Mac OS 9 screen: it’s very…uncomfortable. When i’am looking at it i just want to move it on a trash;) But Seriously!!! Win system from 95 looks LOGICAL! So it don’t create a lot of garbage-like icons on a desktop, it has very power genus solution with name START ( of course, somebody will say , that it was created by Apple, but Apple didn’t REALIZE it like Bill Gates did in Windows!!!). And the last one – new Mac os x 2001 release and Windows XP. I haven’t any words here. It’s just ONLY personal – what looks better: OSX or XP. For me – i can’t use left standing buttons (red-yellow-green) – uncomfortable and unlogical personally!!! I can’t relax in osx style. It’s very, very SO CLEARLY simple. I just can’t imagine an OS without bar includes “File” , “Edit”, “Help” … IN WINDOWS-LIKE ORGANIZATION STYLE!!! But, of course, just my own opinion. That’s all i wanted to say, thanks a lot, if read it (or not ) and again…SORRY FOR MY BAD ENGLISH!

a like this “timelines”

Nostalgia…

Dos forever!!!

Oh man–remember the Microsoft abortion Windows ME? And didn’t Microsoft even give Windows a GUI update between 98 and 2000?

Awesome! Love seeing the old screenshots.

bugoga=) KDE4 == VIsta ^^ 1/1

Wow! That help my university computer study

Wow, the Next GUI looked amazing.

Nothing really changed. Only more colors were added. Compare the second picture and the last picture. The same elements… windows and icons

Wow! I loved this post. It carried me through the entire story of computers…
I felt like in a time machine…
Nice researching work too..

I remember since MS-DoS 6.22 and Windows 3.1!

great collection!!

My first OS: Windows 3.11, I had a 486 with 8MB RAM. Jesus, the time flies!

Kudos to this post!!

WOW…. This post, my dear friend, is a beautifully complete anthology. Thank you. Interesting read even for me, totally non-tech type.

Thnks for the post. I enjoyed it

It’s an awesome post. I belonged to the Windows 3.1 era when I first touched a computer.

I have not much experiences with KDE, might try it sometime soon..

I hope Windows 7 GUI will also be included in this post very soon too.\

Cheers

Windows 7 is not included, because the operating system itself is in Beta and not released to regular consumers yet.

nice post … thanks

You forgot some important gui’s (imo)

Risc/OS (Acorn)
DESQview (build on Quartedeck memory manager QEMM)
Deskmate (Tandy)
QNX
PCW(Amstrad)

And ofcourse there are more.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME POST!

You just made my life easyer. I’m researching about GUI at work, and there is.

Let’s start the keynote!

hey, why hasn’t you you placed beos only in 1995, while it was released several years before that featuring such a great UI?

Where’s the OpenLook?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK

and Photon MicroGUI?
http://www.qnx.com/products/middleware/graphics/photon.html

regards,
Claudio

It would be nice to get KDE 2.x series on the timeline too.

http://kde.org/screenshots/

One truly innovative desktop environment for multiple OS’s not just Linux.

I nostalgia’d pretty hard when I saw OS8’s Control Strip. Also, there were ’skins’ for the Mac going back to OS8. I don’t believe they were available for System 7, but I could be mistaken on that. Either way, there were 3 different themes available, one of them resembling an artist’s sketch pad. I don’t remember what they were called, but I do remember Apple’s legal team going nuts when they were leaked (they weren’t supposed to be made public; I don’t remember why).

Great article, tiny omissions aside.

Mac OS 8.5 themes

They were called Gizmo, HiTech, and (I believe) Paper, which was my favorite. They were released with the betas, but pulled from the final release at the last minute. This was in 1998.

Even Microsoft didn’t call Windows 1.0 an operating system. The box says, “Microsoft Windows Operating Environment”.

ICYI, the system requirements were: 320K memory, DOS 2.0, two double-sided disk drives and a graphics adapter card. Nothing fancy, really.

Without DeskView and especially without DeskViewX the overview is not complete.
DVX had such a features that XP don’t yet. Even after 10-20 years of development.

MS is always more advanced in GUI development since windows 95, I think.

First off, great article and very interesting.

One question on your AmigaOS note – you mention four colors – are you referencing the color scheme of the desktop itself, or the color capability of the machine overall? That was 4096 colors in an era when the PC was still CGA, and Mac was b/w.

I have to go down to the basement and fire up my 1000 for a trip down memory lane now.

Thanks again for taking the time to compile this. Those of us who started our PC journey on Heathkit build-your-owns and Trash-80s have enjoyed the ride…

This is absolutely a wonderful compilation of the Era in OS. I loved this dude. Kudos to you

Good one..nice info about the OS evolution….

Thanks for this post.

AT&T UNIX PC is missed.
http://www.ajwm.net/amayer/papers/unixpc.html

@mycmos Are you kidding me? I’m not MS hater or Apple evangelist, but just look at Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard. The GUI is unified and simple. The whole user experience is constructed logically…

Great Post.
This brought back tons of memories dating back when I was using windows 3.1. I was only in it for the games. But I still remember using mspaint to create drawings pixel by pixel. A lot has change and it’s only going to get better.

The best is KDE 4.2
Hello Inside Linux (ubuntu)
I’M sorry I’m Spanish and I doesn’t speak english very well.
Soy de españa jeje

This article was great!!! I remember when I was using Win 3.1

You left out NeWS (Network extensible Window System) developed by James Gosling (father of Java) at Sun around 1985. Like the X11 Window System, programs sent commands across the network to the window system. But NeWS used PostScript as both the imaging model and the programming language of the window system, so programs talked to the window system similar to the way word processors send PostScript code to a printer.

This meant you could have arbitrary-shaped windows containing fancy resolution-independent PostScript graphics; you could define new PostScript operators in the window system like DrawShaded3DScrollbar and then invoke them instead of sending 20 drawing commands every time, just as a printer driver defines RenderRightJustifiedText; and you could even download entire PostScript programs such as calculators and clocks to run in the window system. It was incredible technology for the time, more advanced than X11 (which overtook it in the workstation market and continues today) and still unmatched today in many ways.

The actual appearance of windows and user interface elements was completely flexible, it was all in PostScript code you could modify. Eventually Sun implemented its OPEN LOOK user interface as a NeWS toolkit. I wish I had a screenshot!

Very cool. Thanks for the memories.

Wow, really makes you think how much it will change in the coming 10 years doesn’t it.

Great Post/Timeline!!!

its amazing and it looks like since vista microsoft got lazy, its why i downgraded my vita to XP

Linux???

Now you have the Microsoft Surface/ Iphone/ Android/ PalmPre/ HP touchsmart GUI too, assuming the future of GUI is touchscreen !!

Minesweeper is still the same ajaja

haha, well, i don’t know what you guy are talking about , because i have less knowledge compared with you guy .
just want to say good job to the person that post this article.
sorry because i don’t know your name.
don’t angry ,ok?^^

Windows had the lead for a few years then Linux Gui and OSX ate MS candy. OS X, KDE and Gnome not only look great but offer a very functional GUI.

awesome! i always kind of dug os9. brings back memories.

Love the memories that all of these pictures bring back. I am really glad that GUIs have improved and I really look forward to the future improvements. I hope that usability continues to be on the forefront of the minds that are working on future GUIs because I love my keyboard and loath my mouse. : )

Gnome 2 Obviously the best

BeOS is incorrectly referred to as BeOs

Windows 95 had ActiveDesktop with the IE4 Shell Update; Windows 98 was not the first appearance.

You missed windows 7

You have seemed to skip an entire os: UNIX. What about CDE or OPENWINDOWS

awesome summary of the whole gui history. good to know how it all started and turned out to be such a great product (the whole gui setup) in the end. I’ve experiend win95 to vista for all the windows releases. good to know starts of gui were NOT windows though

Man I feel old, I sure remember a whole whack of those -at least 90%.

WOW!! Nice time-line. Nice to see the old GUI interfaces again.

Beautiful work they have done over the years.

I remember them all… I reminiscing how hard to create a simple document layout. This is so cool!

What about RISCOS?

There are so many. I will like to see a design as in Minority Report!

Not to be pedantic, but IRIX 3.0 was a proprietary unix developed by SGI, the GUI itself was called 4sight and was replaced with xwindows and 4dwm (which basically looked very similar but allowed an end-user to swap in a different window manager such as nextstep) in IRIX 4.

Sadly, other than becoming more colorful and faster (mostly owing to advancements in hardware) there hasn’t been much improvement in the workings of the interface since XEROX STAR.

Windows GUI development actually started going backwards after 95 up until Vista. Great work Microsoft…

Wheres the Atari TOS?

Awesome trip down memory lane. I didn’t realize that XP is almost 9 years old. Hard to believe that smartphone OS’s now days are more powerful than some of those OS’s.

yah they missed a few OS but still… that is pretty amazing lol

Very cool pot, brings a lot of memories back

No mention of Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion. Makes the timeline seem incomplete.

Nice article. I remember all of them (unfortunately

Glad someone mentioned Sun’s NEWS. It was the most revolutionary of all the GUIs mentioned. We are only now getting to what it could do. And the thing that is getting us there is Javascript!

The one not mentioned and presaged almost all except (or maybe even) the Xerox Alto was Lisp Machines out of the MIT AI Lab and made by Symbolics and Lisp Machine Inc. in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Some screen shots at http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/development-environment/index.html

To quote Martin Howse from “The Road to Lisp” http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/199

Seasoned Lispers come over all dewy eyed at the mere mention of Genera, the OS that ran on the Symbolics Lisp Machines and which included an integrated editor, excellent GUI and a range of functionalities to examine objects and processes. Genera is hard to beat when it comes down to integration and it’s tough to give an idea of the flexibility afforded by the tight bonds between editor, object oriented programming language, GUI toolkit (CLIM) and the OS itself. Genera occupies an important position both within the history of coding and Lisp itself and it’s worth noting the appearance of the Emacs family in this field.

I’m old enough to remember that Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 were NOT “Operating Systems”. They were memory hungry, painful to use “file managers” that you ran on top of the “real” OS, DOS to make it look prettier. No comparison to the Mac OS of the day, which actually was built-in to the OS experience.

Actually, System 7 wasn’t the first MacOS to support color. System 6 was, it was just that a lot of the computers System 6 ran on themselves didn’t support color. If you look at screenshots of the Macintosh II running System 6, Mac OS 6 did support color.

An awesome post. Brings back a lot of memories from my childhood and using computers.

I remember we got our first computer in 1994 and had Windows 3.11 on it. We had a whopping 8Mb hard drive. Oh the days…..

its a nice little summery!

Great article, brings back memories to my gool old Amiga.

Wow, I guess this must be an American post because you totally negated to mention RISC OS for the ACORN computers that were so popular here in the UK throughout the 90’s. I remember ALWAYS having Acorn computers in the house as they were often light-years ahead of its time for desktop publishing, general computing and sheer processing power, running ARM processors!

Shame us Brits can never market anything successfully to the rest of the world, as the world would’ve been a different place if RISC OS was top dawg today…. *sighs*

WOW, great job on the screen shots. Must have taken some time to put that one together.

Excellent article, thanks! It provides nice examples to great design books such as Exploring Interface Design (Design Exploration Series)

Great post, I remember the GEOS for my C64. Those were the days.

Great Post, thanks for sharing this with us!

Nice List and Graphics, however the year 2000 is missing…..Windows 2000?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000

funnily enough its still supported till July 2010!

Windows XP was built on top of Windows 2000

Oh! and Windows NT and Windows NT Workstation – Windows 2000 was built on top of NT!

its all coming back to me now!

…..Sun Systems too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_UNIX

Awesome post it brings good memories to me from my childhood Windows 3.0 was the first OS iv ever used i even still have this old computer

The Mac fanboys always led me to believe that Microsoft copied everything from Apple. The way I see it now is that it’s the other way around, with Mac OS looking like shite until 2001, six years after Win95 and 3 years after Win98.

Ah, those were the times.

Many thanks for this effort. I’m finally starting to understand some of those beasts!

Oh! The memories: GEM on CP/M! Then I had to be drug into Win3.1 just to get my new HP printer to work. Then the office got Win95 for the networking capability. To this day, I don’t use anything past Win98! Although I am trying Linux with the same problems that the later Windows give.

I remember someone sitting me down to an Apple (non-gui) exclaiming “Isn’t this great?” My response, “What do I do now?” (I still don’t read pictoglyphs, need labels under them.)

You’ve forgot about OS/2 Warp 3 … This was like 4 years of my life =)

The Os/2 2.0 screenshots shown above (http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c31872/os-2-2.gif, etc.) are actually from the os/2 warp 3.0, or at least for me they seem very similar to those. Afair, 2.0 had different window design, animation effects, etc. Strangely, no mention of warp 3.0 here at all.

Ummm where is X-windows in this list? It predates most of whats here, and is still in use (I’m using it right now to post this) unlike most of the stuff here.

Great interfaces… those days were so good!

@3drockz

So it’s 28 years of same old sh*t: windows upon windows with buttons and sliders. I’m not saying I could come up with anything better, but I’m not genius behind UI design in a big software company  

I’ve been looking for a timeline like this for awhile. Thanks for posting.

Another nifty OS interface you omitted is GO’s PenPoint around 1991, developed for the pen-based tablet computers that were going to be the next big thing. It made extensive use of gestures. These included the first use of press and drag to move the selection (which other operating systems quickly copied), but many other gestures like a caret to embed a document, and two underlines to automatically sum a column of numbers in the Numero third-party spreadsheet. Instead of a desktop UI it had a true notebook UI which you could embed document pages for different applications, with section tabs and page turn icons (all of which Microsoft shamelessly ripped off for their Windows for Pen Computing smoke and mirrors pre-announcement).

The PenPoint OS was object oriented and the toolkit had intelligent layout to support changing the screen orientation, which together made document embedding much simpler to implement than Microsoft’s convoluted Object Linking and Embedding spec.

PenPoint won best Operating System in the 1992 Byte Awards and in PC Magazine’s 1991 Technical Excellence awards but despite hardware from several manufacturers (including the first IBM ThinkPad) and applications from many software companies it never caught on. It was briefly referenced in AT&T’s “someday you will FAX from the beach” TV ads, sadly AT&T’s EO Communicator was dying in the marketplace while their TV commercials were saying “Some day…”

General Magic and Apple’s Newton followed later in the 90s, more pen-based communicators with handwriting recognition and their own slew of innovations.

You are missing X Window as a few people complain above (note it is ‘X Window’ NOT plural ‘X Windows’), which is the underlying framework for IRIX, Gnome, KDE, etc. I suppose that might be why it’s missing – it is just a framework for remote presentation of a GUI (but note how radical that concept is in 1984!). But it was released in about 84. So there would be earlier examples than IRIX. E.g. Sun X terminals (with the three-button, optical mouse that had to have the special etched mousepad).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

Nice post!

I can remember most of these and it was nice to see how things have improved. My favorite of all was KDE4!

Ahhh …. this brings back so many memories ! I remember installing Win 3.1 on my computer – the “beast” had a 80 MHz CPU and 16MB RAM .
Great list, thanks!

VisiCalc was great – and it still works (and the original is still available) – imagine a fully functional spreadsheet that has a total memory footprint less than 50k or so… And I remember using windows 2.0 on a monochrome (blue on blue LCD) laptop from HP, what a dog that was.

Great post and nice time line

After reading the comment of Katiero I think there is a that cannot differenciate the OS from the GUI.

Windows 3.11 was a GUI, not an OS.

Excelent Post; There were so many I haven’t seen in my life. What a post, dude. Excelent. My sincere congrats.

Increible…!!!
Todo esto muestra el avance que se ha dado en el aspecto computacional y todo lo que el desarrollo del hombre ha podido lograr en base a estudios, tenacidad y esfuerzo constante, pasando de decada en decada y de generación en generación los conocimientos que han ido construyendose paso a poso. Pensar que pertenezco a la epoca inicial en la cual se programaba en lenguaje assembler o en clipper o fox entre otros que son parte sin duda de toda esta revolución. He reconocido el 80% de los productos mostrados y sigo pensando en… “hasta donde llegaremos”, “cual será el final?” y por último… esto nos debería de hacer pensar en si hemos logrado para la humanidad el desarrollo y su bien?…
Espero que sigamos avanzando para el desarrollo de toda la humanidad.
Gracias….
Mirko

What about Sugar OLPC interface? Probably it should be considered on this evolution.

wow..it is really nice article. I have never known some operating systems before windows 95 and this article gives me more information about it.

Windows 2000 is missed !

You should absolutely add a box about X11 running twm, from 1984 on. It was minimal, but we were still using it around 1992/1993 when it would happily host the Mosaic and Netscape web browsers… and we were playing multiuser games on the Internet via the X11 protocol: One central application sending one copy of its GUI to all of the users.
The proliferation of open source window managers started in the early 90s, which I understand would be too many to mention here. The family tree of X11 window managers is a whole article on its own…

An important note on GEOS — it had to be installed in the mid ’90s in order to use AOL on a PC. When they moved to the Win3.1 platform you couldn’t play Neverwinter Nights anymore, the very first MMORPG! =o

Great, great post.. Thanks, it was really interesting! But, by the way, did you forget about the least famed GUI in the history, Microsoft BOB!?!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_bob

Bye!

PicciMario

as has been noted above, this misses the GUI families related to the “X Window System” from MIT, which ran atop all the important non-consumer/research/engineering OSes of the 90s — HP’s HP-UX, IBM’s AIX, Sun’s SunOS & Solaris, SGI IRIX, DEC Ultrix, Linux, the BSDs (freeBSD, netBSD, BSDi), etc.

atop this basic system were “window managers” that completed the GUI.
two of the most historically long-lived and important — mwm (”motif”) and twm (”tim’s”) — are best understood by realizing the breadth and depth of their spawn of siblings and descendants, e.g., tvtwm (first window manager with simultaneous multiple desktops), wildly popular fvwm/fvwm2, windowmaker, enlightenment, sawfish, etc.

singling out just SGI’s IRIX is actually somewhat sensible, though, in that SGI did not use X windows, and was the only platform to have native 3D graphics hardware, and this was exposed in subtle slick ways in the GUI, such as by allowing you to zoom elements of the entire desktop (windows, fonts, icons) fractionally in or out via on-screen scroll wheel. it took until the end of the nineties before “desktop PC” graphics card makers (like NVidia and ATI) finally included this, and developers got access to it (via either DirectX from microsoft or OpenGL in the open standards community), and could put it into their programs — and their GUIs.

computer hackers (eg, computer science grad students) in the 90s used to make it a point of honor to spend ridiculous amounts of time customizing these GUIs for themselves and their friends. they would add/subtract/move buttons, change borders and mouse interactions, vary the “docks” and “docking”, and mix these metaphors (eg, run programs inside the dock, the way a clock is still today). i’d wager a pretty penny that everything from win95 on was heavily influenced by this aesthetic, or even built by a member of this community. the screenshots are pretty amazing.

Awesome list. Thank you!

Where is the AT&T 3B1 (aka 7300)? – it had a GUI & mouse in 1987

The base O/S was Unix System V release 2 with Convergent’s BSD add-ons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3b1

Great collection! I am impressed and also reminded how old I am… The gui (and the mouse) was however developed at Stanford Research Institute by Douglas Engelbart in the 60ties. It was displayed toa wide community in 1968, an event often referred to as “the mother of all demos”. The NLS demoed even included videoconferencing and hypertext.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_System

Cheers,

Lars Albinsson

check http://yourtvonline.com

Anyone remember HP Wave – it wasn’t an OS though, but more than a GUI… Anyway they had cool marketing toys of a surfer on a wave inside i glass tube filled with viscous goo like a lavalamp…maybe that was the best part

damn… thx god i didn’t live in the 1980s.

Nice post, thanks! I’m surprised to read so many people commenting on how far we’ve come. Looking at this post, it actually strikes me that we haven’t come that far. Add better resolution and more colors to those first pictures, they’d pass as a modern GUI.

I still remember the Windows 3.1 File Manager with fondness, there was something quite brilliant about it – not that I remember now what!

Great post…..
Hey everybody, with your Post Comments…state at what point you entered into the world (computing!)

here’s mine…

I entered and used Windows 3.0 for the first time in my life! but then I didnt come back to actually using a computer till Windows 3.1

Wow, NeXTSTEP 1989 was really outstanding !

Amazing list. Thanks for sharing!

I agree that not that much has happened. (The Xerox star/80 was even better than todays system. I remember that it only had one file type. You didn’t need the software to view the files made by it. It was as if the OS only had PDF files. Any software could read and edit, but still specialize…)

I seem to remember early Silicon Graphics had a quite different interface with 3D menus. That was a bit different form the ordinary windowing system.

(I entered the business in 1982. First GUI experience was programming an Apple Lisa.)

Great story!
The omission of the windowing system on the Unix workstations from mid 80s to 90s is unfortunate. The X Window System still forms the basis of MacOS X and Linux GUI today. The all-out war on window manager between Motif and Sun’s OpenLook was just an example that the Unix vendors didn’t get it – their biggest ‘enemy’ is not the other Unix offering, but Windows on PC on the horizon.

I think this is a great article. One notable GUI is missing, Desqview X… though it was short lived, it was around in the 1990 era of PCs.

Otherwise, I think the article is great and definitely covers the gambit of the evolution of the GUI… which obviously and hopefully would continue to evolve.

WOW, great article! Thanks for sharing !!

You forgot Windows ME

Now tell me – what OS/GUI does they use in C:S:I

Their computers can do ANYTHING for them : find ANY data, compare, manipulate, calculate and use them ANY way they like, not to mention the presentation of data

Thanks for the post. Memories and nightmares, but a lot of fun.

I see 3 versions of the default windows

windows 98 se

windows milenium

windows 2000

LINUX
I CAN’T WAIT GNOME 3.0!!!!
WHEN MARCH 2010
I AM HAPPY
LINUX MINT AND UBUNTU

Cool article but leaving out screens of compiz is a mistake. It makes gnome + kde look from the future (instead your last screens where they look like they’ve stayed behind).

wow yeah. totally agree on the comments about missing out the likes of compiz enhanced kde/gnome. … not to mention… all the other stuff missed out. and this is pretty much all stacking window management…. what of the tiling window managers? oh right… they’re just for a niche market where people prefer practicality above graphical vanity. i keep forgetting that…. it’s about how it looks thats important isnt it.

was very impressed how far ahead nextstep/openstep looked in this.

i hope the world knows there are more options out there than just kde and gnome.

an lxde or openbox, maybe with a compatible compositor, and tint2… they can look really gorgeous, and not steal all your resources, which is handy if you actually use your computer for something (other than running your desktop environment). ^_^

This collection is really amazing! We’ve really come a long way. Thank you for this.

I was expecting just an overview of old user interfaces from Mac and Windows, and a few others.

I was pleasantly surprised to even see Linux desktop environments included, with up-to-date images of Gnome and KDE. This was a great time-line of user interfaces, very informative, and includes everything!

Only thing I find missing is Compiz/Beryl. That had a major impact on Vista and Mac OS X.

Or, I’m backwards, and Mac OS X had an impact on Compiz/Beryl. Ah, well… That’s kinda why I wish that was included, so I could know.

“The 64-bit IRIX operating system was created for UNIX. An interesting feature of this GUI is the support for vector icons. This feature was built into the GUI long before Mac OS X even existed.”

Mac OS X doesn’t support vector icons… yet. Although it supports vector wallpapers butI think I’m the only person who has noticed

“Only thing I find missing is Compiz/Beryl. That had a major impact on Vista and Mac OS X.
Or, I’m backwards, and Mac OS X had an impact on Compiz/Beryl. Ah, well… That’s kinda why I wish that was included, so I could know.”

Quartz, Quartz Extreme (GPU accelerated Quartz) and Core Image (Shaders) came YEARS before Compiz/Beryl/Vista

Apollo (and possibly others) had highly advanced full-colour Unix graphical desktops in the early 80’s. Far ahead of the ones you show as examples

Ohhhh…………

very Good Things You Have Shared….

I was working at Xerox in the 1980s and used the 8010 – the ‘Star’. Absolutely awesome piece of kit, and when combined with one of Xerox’ early hi-volume laser printers, they made for an unbelievably powerful tool. Just so expensive though, and so few people knew how to sell it – or, indeed, how to buy it. All neatly summarised in a book called ‘Fumbling the Future’.

Very nice job! Just like the world history, anyone who works with computers, should know the history of UI.

This is absolutely OUTSTANDING! Thanks for such a rich look at the arc of Interface Design over almost 30 years.

Wow… I’ve been designing GUI’s since 1989 (don’t do the math – LOL) and I even had a hand in several of these examples you showed. It makes me smile to see the evolution of commercial GUI design and realize that for all that has changed in 30 years, so much has really remained the same. I do believe it’s time for a revolutionary change to our GUI experience – and I’m really curious to learn what it is going to be! There are several up and coming new user experience paradigms and it’s going to be fun to see which one(s) our user community adopts. I think things are about to get interesting again!

nice thanx …..
totally awesome……

Com’ooon whrere is Windows 7 announcement and beta release?))That’s a true next step for Windows in terms of stability and user friendliness. I would say it is more of a FIRST step for Windows to that.

Great list – thanks!

I have really only followed the Microsoft evolution, but from memory here’s a few things that probably defined their releases in terms of jumps…

- Windows 3.1 from memory introduced networking
- Windows98 (Sp2) from memory introduced USB support

2 of the most significant updates from the original release I think.

Great post! I loved it!
Miss the Win 3.11 interface, first GUI I had contact with!

Very nice content here. Great screenshots.
Really brought back some good memories.

I love nostalgia, but there is always a small feeling of disapointment and denial when you see the old things they are ALWAYS much better in your memory.
But in regards to this article I would like people to enlighten me on why Amiga failed so miserably in the professional segment. When compared to the GUIs at the time it is so fare ahead. And i personaly used it for text editing and DTP and it was user friendlier than Macintosh which by my account was the next best thing. Comments welcome.

Huh! 28 years ago.. but it was as though yesterday. Time like a river…

good is article .. thanks ..