FROM THE ARCHIVES OF PRAGPUB, JANUARY 2019
Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer — A Moment in the History of the Computer: The Graphical User Interface
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In this latest installment in his computer history series, Mike discusses the graphical user interface.
This series on the history of the personal computer takes a light approach, including fictional scenes meant to put you in the moment. Fictionalized might be a more accurate description: in some cases, the scene is consistent with what might have happened, and in other cases, the scene represents an actual conversation that took place between the individuals, but with dialogue that I improvised based on what I know.
At the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in San Francisco in 1968, Douglas Engelbart walked onto the stage where an elaborate collection of equipment had been set up. He put on headphones, clipped on a microphone, and sat down in front of a computer monitor surrounded by other obscure devices. A large screen dominated the wall behind him. Thus began what is invariably referred to as “the Mother of All Demos.”
In 1968 more people communicated with computers by means of decks of punched cards or teletype machines than through detached keyboards and CRT screens. And nobody was controlling the point of focus on the screen by sliding a little device around on the desktop. This “mouse” was something Engelbart had invented.
His demo employed futuristic technology, but it was really about managing information. The fortunate attendees got a glimpse of how information processing could work — a glimpse far into the future, as it turned out. The attendees saw on the screen electronic documents being reorganized and examined in different ways at a click of the mouse. Lines of text expanded into bullet lists then retreated. A click on a word in a document could bring up another related document. A couple more clicks and two documents were displayed side-by-side for comparison in a split-screen display.
The microphone and headphones came into play when Engelbart connected with an assistant at a remote location.
Scene: San Francisco, 1968
Hi! I need to know what terminal you’re on, Bill.
Thirteen.
Okay, I’d like to have him see my text and so, this special thing if I label 13 will switch over, so on his display he sees my text. So I’ll execute it and sure enough, it does. But what’s that running around?
Well, if he’s looking at my text, he’d like to have something to say about it, so we put on a marker, a tracking spot that he controls, so he is sitting in Menlo Park, looking at this text and he can point to it.
We’re both looking at the same display, and we can talk to each other and point and maybe later, I can hand you the chalk on this blackboard like saying, “Here, you control it.”
Hi, Bill. Now we’re connected, you can see my work, you can point at it and I can see your face, we can talk. So let’s do some collaborating.
Soon, Engelbart and the assistant were collaborating on the editing of a document on the screen, each of them, in turn, taking control of the document and making changes visible in real time to both of them.
The presentation was a big hit. Engelbart had demonstrated a new way of thinking about computers and human interaction, showing innovative ways of displaying information beyond mere lines of text. And he presented communication and a key capability of a computer. His ideas inspired many developers, particularly some people who would go to work for a new division of Xerox in Silicon Valley, near Stanford.
Xerox PARC
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, was launched in 1970 as a Xerox research arm. It was deliberately located close to Stanford, the nexus of so much creativity; and underscoring how important this connection was to Xerox, the center’s name included the name of Stanford’s hometown. Xerox PARC pioneered a lot of technologies, but in particular, they adopted Engelbart’s ideas and set to work realizing them.
PARC hired programmers and engineers with big ideas. It was run more like a university research program than a company, sharing ideas in a spirit that owed much to the hobbyist community it was close to. Alan Kay, one of the researchers, had a cardboard model on his desk of his dream computer, Dynabook, small enough to fit in a bookbag, but fully capable. He was intent on making it a reality. Meanwhile, he came up with a powerful programming language called Smalltalk, and an entire development environment that introduced ideas central to the Graphical User Interface, in which users interact with programs using the mouse and visual icons, and files are presented visually in visual folders. Bob Metcalf created a robust method for networking computers together that he called Ethernet. PARC research projects were not required to be product-related, but researchers themselves wanted to put their inventions out there. This enthusiasm may have led to more sharing than was in Xerox’s interest.
Not that PARC didn’t produce products. In 1974, they pulled together many of these technologies in an innovative and expensive computer called the Alto. It was built around the Smalltalk language, the mouse, and Metcalf’s Ethernet, which let multiple Altos in an office be connected in what Xerox called the “office of the future.” The Alto was unlike anything else then available, but it was priced like a minicomputer, and only sold about 2000 units, many to government agencies, like the House of Representatives, which used Altos to maintain and print the Congressional Record.
Xerox tried again with what was intended to be a true commercial product, the Star, in 1981. Again, they priced it out of the existing personal computer market, and the Star was not a commercial success. But by this time, many of the key people had left, believing in the technology but frustrated by Xerox’s slowness and failure to understand the market.
And worse, two years earlier they had given all their jewels to a competitor.
Scene: Palo Alto, 1973
A researcher at Stanford, Adele Goldberg signed on at Xerox PARC in 1973 and worked her way up to being the manager of the System Concepts Laboratory. One day her boss told her that Steve Jobs had complained to him about her. The conversation may have gone something like this:
Boss: He says he asked for a tour and you refused him. Goldberg: He didn’t ask, he demanded.
Boss: Yeah, that sounds like Jobs. What does he want to see?
Goldberg: Everything. Smalltalk, the Alto, the whole show Dan and Larry put on.
Boss: As you say, they do put on that show. We’ve done it for Al Gore, Adele. We can do it for Steve Jobs.
Goldberg: Fine. If it’s your decision to give away the kitchen sink to a computer company, that’s what we’ll do. I just think it’s a terrible idea.
Apple at this time had several projects underway. The Apple ][ was getting long in the tooth, though it still brought in plenty of money. It was the company’s first product — the Apple 1 was sold to fellow hobbyists before Apple had really become a company. The original Apple 1 circuit board was framed and hung in the Apple offices, labeled “Our Founder.” The Apple ][ had been the making of the company. But Wozniak had designed the Apple ][ around the cheapest microprocessor he could find, and there were more capable CPU chips available now. Also, the Apple ][ had been designed with programmers and game players in mind — which is to say, Woz designed it for himself. Apple management was intent now on building a machine for the business community. It had done so, in fact, with a product called the Apple III. But while the Apple ][ had been designed entirely by one extraordinary mind, the Apple III was a committee design, and when it was released, it was found to have a lot of problems.
While Apple was scrambling to fix the problems with the Apple III, two other computer projects were underway, run by different engineers. The Lisa, with software designed under the direction of Bill Atkinson, was to be a high-end, expensive business machine, while the Macintosh, headed up by Jef Raskin, was to be small, simple, easy to use.
Both projects were completely redirected as a result of a trip Steve Jobs and some engineers took to Xerox PARC.
Ironically, it was Raskin who made the connection. Few others at Apple had any idea what was going on at PARC, including Jobs. But Raskin understood that they were doing something interesting, and got Atkinson to convince Jobs to go see.
Dan Ingalls and Larry Tesler conducted the tour, showing off the Smalltalk language, the mouse, the Graphical User Interface. It was a dazzling show.
When Jobs asked why text scrolling wasn’t smooth, Ingalls made the change on the fly. At one point he rotated the CRT ninety degrees and the display on the screen adjusted itself automatically to this new orientation. For PARC, there was nothing particularly unusual in this demo. PARC had given similar tours to others, including Herbie Hancock and Al Gore. Alan Kay had written an article about their work for Scientific American magazine. Most of those other visitors, though, had not been engineers or computer company founders.
Some of the PARC team, especially Adele Goldberg, thought it was a terrible idea to share this information with a computer company. Jobs and his team didn’t see any code and they weren’t shown how PARC achieved its effects, but they did see the end result, and they were blown away. PARC was inventing the future of computing. This, Jobs decided on the spot, is what we need to be doing.
Back at Apple, he redirected work on the Lisa — and subsequently on the Macintosh — toward the PARC model. He hired PARC engineers. He told existing Apple engineers that if they were still working on the Apple ][ or Apple III, they were losers. The Lisa, or later the Macintosh, was the future. He set up a skunkworks in a separate building so the Mac developers wouldn’t have to interact with those losers. They were pirates, Jobs told them, and it’s better to be pirates than to join the navy.
Jobs had missed the real depth of the work at PARC, seeing only the surface, the user interface. But that in itself was revolutionary. When the Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984, it really did redefine personal computing. The graphical user interface was clearly more accessible to the average person than the command-line interfaces of personal computers up to that point.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was at work cloning the Mac interface. Microsoft programmers had been given advance access to the Macintosh development process. Apple wanted to launch the Mac with some major third-party software already available, and by now, Microsoft was the heaviest hitter in software. Giving them early access meant that they could get supporting products out early. It also meant that they would learn how to create their own version of the Mac interface. Or properly, the PARC interface.
Soon, Microsoft released a product called Windows that made a computer running MS-DOS look a lot like a Macintosh. The first versions of Windows were extremely clumsy, just a shell on top of MS-DOS. Gradually, Microsoft improved Windows until it was essentially an operating system itself.
Other companies caught the GUI bug. Digital Research released a GUI called GEM, the company selling VisiCalc produced VisiOn, and IBM tried out its own GUI product called TopView. That name may have been too obvious an admission that all these products were initially just a thin face painted on top of an old operating system. Only Windows evolved into a legitimate competitor to Apple’s designed-in GUI. There were two kinds of personal computers now: Macintoshes and IBM-type computers running Microsoft Windows. And functionally those two types weren’t all that different.
The near-universal embrace of the graphical user interface marked a change in what it meant to be a personal computer. The consensus definition of a personal computer now embraced the GUI. Documents on screen should look like their printed form, the organization of documents in files and folders should be directly visually represented, there should be direct manipulation of objects on the screen, commands should be organized in clickable menus. Whether it was a Macintosh or a Windows machine, it was unambiguous what a personal computer consisted of. There was clarity.
That clarity was soon to be completely exploded. Next: the end of personal computers.
About the Author
Michael Swaine served as editor of PragPub Magazine and was Editor-in-chief of the legendary Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He is co-author of the seminal computer history book, Fire in the Valley, and an editor at Pragmatic Bookshelf.
