Misc. links

• Video cards were originally much the same resolution as teletext. However whilst Video cards advanced teletext's format remained the same.

• Windows 3.0, released 1990, utilised a graphics card with over 1600 colours.
• An article from 1987 about teletext in the US. Shows how behind the times the American continent was with teletext: televisions with appropriate encoders were not widely available in 1987.
• It's always worth a look at the Lektrolab Flickr stream.
• About the first video game -'Spacewar' at inventors.com
• Windows 95 was a pretty popular Operating System in its time. It helped Internet Explorer dominate the web browser market for ages. WorldWideWeb, meanwhile, was the first web browser and HTML editor.
  
• An important landmark in the history of the BBC and indeed television - the Queen's coronation. 22 million people watched.
  

Atari user customised GUI

As an addition to the earlier GUI interface analysis, I found this video by Paul Slocum demonstrating his customised interface for the Atari 2600:

The video may only be short, but the interface is even simpler than the ones previously analysed. It's the ultimate in simplicity - the icons are minimal and obvious. The cursor, which is actually only a block of colour, can be moved around using the directional keys. The 'exit' icon is reduced to a simple white pixel whilst the pop up window is outlined with a dashed line. Even the text (see 0:33) is rendered in pixels.

I wonder if something like this could be applied to Teletext? Taking the GUI back in time by mixing modern interfaces with a teletext aesthetic.

GUIs in action

After a bit of searching on YouTube, found quite a few videos relating to the Apple Lisa, the first commercially successful GUI interface. The above video is an emulator running on a modern Mac OS. In it is exhibited some of the Apple design team's layouts and icon designs as well as some of the capabilities of the medium.

In particular the icons are very simple but are clear metaphors. Sometimes these need some additional text but in time users would have got to know what each icon meant. The statistics application is another well designed element, as is the mind map creator, though these seem pretty primitive by today's standards. Icon metaphors include an hourglass to represent a wait, floppy disk to represent external storage hardware (including floppies) and strange solid black triangles and rhombuses for warning icons.



Compare this to the BBC Micro. The above video is a welcome disc. It's more of a showcase of some of the things the computer can do, with little applications such as simple text based games and keyboard agility tests. This GUI is less advanced than the Lisa's, employing text and colour rather than graphics to navigate menus.

In fact, this computer uses a teletext system to navigate. There are small elements of graphics (a simple 'gun' like in Space Invaders obliterates some text at one point) typical of teletext. Things like the pattern generator, though, are a bit more advanced. Thus, this could be regarded as the 'next step up' from analogue Ceefax.



Finally, the Amiga Workbench is very similar to the Lisa, only is in colour. Displays some of the applications from the Mac, including a pixellated clock, calculator, notepad etc. A lot of icons here and it's interesting how many things can be conveyed by the simple computer icon. Stopwatches, hammers, pixellated printers and speech bubbles help the user navigate the various menus which, if perused via a command line interface, would be very boring.

Computing Interface timeline

A timeline of significant events in the history of GUIs.

All text in this post is sourced, selected and copied directly from Toastytech.

1973: The Alto computer (by XEROX) utilises a 3 button mouse, a bit-mapped display and use of graphical windows, not to mention Ethernet network connection.

1981: The Star (right), successor to the Alto, is released, incorporating double-clickable icons, overlapping windows, dialog boxes and a 1024x768 monochrome display.

1983: Apple introduces the Lisa, which includes pull down menus and menu bars. Finder windows can be dragged around the screen by "grabbing" the title bar with the mouse. Clicking the small box in the upper left of the window closes the window. Files and folders can be dragged to the desktop - although they do not actually exist there. The item is not copied or moved to another location, only the icon is displaced from the folder where it really is and displayed on the desktop instead The Trash icon works in a similar manner, holding icons until the Empty Trash option is selected and the files are deleted.

1984: Computer Research release GEM. It is graphically very similar to the Mac interface. The GEM UI attempted to be a clone of the Macintosh UI of the time. It was nowhere as sophisticated or complete, but it has similar menus, overlapping windows, icons for files and folders, drives on the desktop, drag and drop, exiting apps uses file-quit, and a trash icon. A few noticeable differences: Opening a folder always opens it in the same window rather than a new one, the trash icon is not a real folder, and drive icons must be manually added or removed. However, it was close enough the the Mac UI that Apple sued Digital Research.

1985: Microsoft's Windows for IBM PC released. Has tiled windows.

1985: Commodore releases the Amiga 1000 with Amiga Workbench (right). When the Amiga was first introduced in 1985 it was far ahead of its time with features such as multiple resolution high-color graphics, stereo sound, and pre-emptive multitasking that made it a great machine for multimedia applications and gaming.

1987: Apple introduces the Apple Macintosh II, the first colour Macintosh.
1987: Acorn releases "Arthur" for the Acorn computer, it is the basis for RISC OS. RISC OS 2 and 3 have a similar look, but an improved feel.

1990: Windows 3.0 released by Microsoft. Features: Program Manager shell. About this time Microsoft finally realized that the GUI was catching on. Functionally, the window management is not much different than version 2.x, however they took some steps to make it look fancier. Command buttons and the window controls now have a 3D look. However this 3Dnes did not extend to many other window controls.

1993: Microsoft releases the first version of Windows NT, their 32-bit OS. They give it the version number "3.1" and use the same user interface they do for regular Windows 3.1. Made available for Intel, Power PC, Alpha, and MIPS systems.

1995: Microsoft introduces Windows 95 on August 24th.

1997: Mac OS 8 is finally released. Selling 1.25 million copies in less than 2 weeks, it becomes the best-selling software in that period.

1998: Microsoft releases Windows 98. Features: Internet Explorer Web browser application takes over the role of the Windows shell, advertising right on the desktop, entire help system replaced by Internet Explorer.

Source: Toastytech

Bill Atkinson

Bill Atkinson is a prominent designer and computer programmer, best known for his work on early Mac computers (original Mac system shown left). These are best known for being the first to use Graphical User Interfaces rather than code input interfaces (CLI).

Amongst his creations were MacPaint and the 'marching ants' selection tool. He was also the designer and implementer of HyperCard, a hypertext style system structured like a database of index cards for the Mac. It was used as a presentation method as well as an archiving system, and used a unique coding language that was more or less in readable English.

When Atkinson first started at Apple, he, along with his design team, were charged with creating applications for the Macintosh. Working on limited and restricted specifications (up to what computing power could handle at the time), it was suggested that these ought to be miniature metaphors, such as a calculator or a notepad, on the desktop (as with the control panel, right).

These work with restrictions a bit different to teletext. To start with, screen resolution is much larger, giving the opportunity to work with more intricate graphics. However the colour was limited to greyscale as opposed to teletext's 8-colour palette.
Above are some examples of the kind of icon he would create. The GUI layouts Atkinson would help to develop would become the industry standard, setting the benchmark for future developments, eventually used by other systems including the Windows OS.

Sources
Folklore.org
Wikipedia