The Evolution of the Desktop GUI

After building and designing personal computers throughout the ’70s, Xerox had a breakthrough in 1981 when it unveiled Star, the first system that integrated desktop computing with various technologies that are now commonplace: a bitmapped display, a GUI (graphical user interface), icons, folders, a mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail.

Star was ahead of its time and not commercially successful, but it was incredibly influential, setting the standard for GUIs to come from Microsoft, Apple and Sun, among others.

The Macintosh, released in 1984 with the legendary “Big Brother” TV commercial, was the first commercially successful product to use a mouse and a GUI. It built on the Xerox Star GUI by making windows and icons easier to use with a mouse. For the first time, files and folders could be copied by dragging and dropping them into the desired location.

Mac OS 1.0 may not be remembered as a great system — the Macintosh was underpowered (it ran on 128K of RAM), expensive and not very user-friendly — but it did bring the GUI to the masses.

Windows 7 redeemed the problems of Vista, winning over consumers and businesses because of its speed and flexibility, but also because of its new GUI features, including a revamped taskbar that includes pinned icons and jump lists. It also built on the Aero visual style from Vista with features like Aero Snap, which allows you to place two windows side by side and Aero Shake, which lets you minimize all other windows by shaking the current window. It also gave users more control over UAC settings, a welcome fix of a Vista shortcoming.