GUIs Gone Wild! Nostalgia Time for Your User Interface

Geek porn doesn't get any pornier than this: A walk down memory lane of the GUI as we know it. None of us were using the Xerox Alto, which had the first graphical user interface of any importance (including a mouse), in 1973. You can see it on this exhaustive site, The GUI Gallery, which stretches from the Alto to Windows XP and beyond.

Even if you don't remember these interfaces personally, don't miss the important history lesson about how far we've come, and in some cases, stepped back. Key moments in history: Compare the MacOS in 1987 to the comparable version of Windows, version 2.03. MacOS looks a lot like Windows 95 would look eight years later. The operative feature of Windows 2 was that you could actually resize windows. The screenshot looks primitive by comparison.

Also don't miss the 1988 NeXT operating system (a Steve Jobs skunkwork project that looks a lot like modern Unix GUIs today, aka OPENSTEP) and 1995's BeOS, which was favored by hobbyists and tinkerers for the few years it was around... until the company went bankrupt. And somehow, in 2001, Microsoft still has a stupid talking dog in Windows XP.

GUIs like Apple's Aqua and the upcoming Aero (part of Vista) prove that we haven't yet reached the limits of what an interface can do. Multiple workspaces, 3-D animations, integrated search... we've seen some impressive advances recently and more coming in the next few months. What do you want from your user interface that you can't get today? Or is the current way we interact with our computers already overkill? Discuss.