Old Content

More GUIs of the 1980s

Windows 2.0

Windows itself was updated to version 2.0 in late 1987, abandoning the tiled window approach in favor of the now-traditional overlapping method. This release, along with enhancement software sold by HP called NewWave, caused Apple to sue Microsoft over the "look and feel" of the GUI. Apple eventually lost this case, although HP had already withdrawn NewWave from the market by this time.

Acorn

Also in 1987, the UK-based company Acorn Computers introduced their first GUI along with what was the world's first 32-bit RISC-based microcomputer, the Acorn A305/A310. This GUI used proportionally-sized scroll bars and introduced a new concept: a "Dock" or shelf at the bottom of the screen where shortcuts to launch common programs and tools could be kept. The GUI, called "Arthur", also was the first to feature anti-aliased display of on-screen fonts, even in 16-color mode!

It is important to note that many of the GUIs released in the mid-80s appear to be using fixed-width fonts, such as GEM, Windows 1.0, Amiga Workbench and Arthur. In fact all of these GUIs supported proportionally-spaced fonts in applications, but they used a fixed-width font for the system (menus and icon labels) for the sake of clarity. The reason for this is because of the low resolution of the display screens (often 640 by 200) in the hardware at the time. Even the Macintosh, with its slightly higher vertical resolution of 384 pixels, had a specially-designed system font (Chicago) that was easy to read, even if it was "grayed out" as unavailable menu options were. As screen resolutions increased, GUIs generally moved towards proportionally-spaced fonts even for the standard system text.

NeXTSTEP

1988 saw the release of NeXTSTEP, the new GUI and operating system for Steve Jobs' NeXT computer, his first major project after leaving Apple in 1985. NeXTSTEP introduced a sharp, 3D beveled look to all of its GUI components, was the first to use the "X" symbol to indicate a close window widget, and introduced the idea of a vertical menu strip in the upper left-hand corner, which could also be "torn off" at any point so that the user could leave specific menus at any point on the screen. NeXTSTEP also had a Dock that lived on any side of the screen (but the default was on the right hand side).

OS/2

Also in 1988 came the first graphical version of OS/2, a project designed to replace DOS that was (at the time) a collaborative effort between IBM and Microsoft. OS/2 1.0 had been text-only, but version 1.1 came with a graphical user interface known as the Presentation Manager. This was visually quite similar to Windows 2.0.

X marks the spot

Just before the end of the 1980s, new GUIs started appearing on Unix workstations manufactured by AT&T and Sun (Open Look) and DEC and HP (Motif Open Software Foundation or OSF). These ran on top of a networked windowing architecture known as X, which would later be the foundation for GUIs on Linux. These were simple GUIs that attempted to mimic the appearance of Microsoft Windows but still allow access to the power of the Unix shell underneath. X also introduced a new GUI idea where merely moving the mouse cursor over a window would automatically activate it and allow the user to start typing in it.

The initial design goal of the X Window System (which was invented at MIT in 1984) was merely to provide the framework for displaying multiple command shells and a clock on a single large workstation monitor. The philosophy of X was to "separate policy and mechanism" which meant that it would handle basic graphical and windowing requests, but left the overall look of the interface up to the individual program.

To provide a consistent interface, a second layer of code, called a "window manager" was required on top of the X Window server. The window manager handled the creation and manipulation of windows and window widgets, but was not a complete graphical user interface. Another layer was created on top of that, called a "desktop environment" or DE, and varied depending on the Unix vendor, so that Sun's interface would look different from SGI's. With the rise of free Unix clones such as Linux and FreeBSD in the early 90s, there came a demand for a free, open-sourced desktop environment. Two of the more prominent projects that satisfied this need were the KDE and GNOME efforts, which were started in 1996 and 1997 respectively.