Xerox is not only to copy paper
In the previous post I talked about the tory of the GUI, and I gave you a small introdution about GUIs and the Sketchpad. But one of the big jumps in the graphical interfaces world has been given by Xerox when they builded the first desktop system called 8010 Star Information System in 1981. T was the first commercial system with GUI that joined various technologies and after some years we could call it by "Personal Computer". T system was awesome, displaying true bitmaps (instead of vectors like Sketchpad) in its interface. And it was the first interface that uses the concept of windows, icons, folders and menus.
The main philosophy for the construction of t interface is that should be intuitive for the end user, to be used in offices and businesses. And to do that, they used the concept of "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG).
And then, we can see a screen where there are icons and folders, each representing a kind of file (file types like images, texts, etc), where clicking on t icon, it opens a new window with content inside. Note that in the Xerox Star there are not advanced programs like image editors and word processors, but each type of document opens in its appropriate application, and nothing more.
The Xerox Star's interface follows the concept of objects, for example, in a text editor you have an object "page", the object "paragraph", "line", "word", etc and if you click on t object you invoke a range of options such as copy, paste, crop and remove. In other cases it becomes a new "options window" where you can set different properties for each kind of object.
One of innovations also includes the hight compatibility between applications, for example, if you create an graph object into a image editor, you can insert it into the text editor together your text. T ability to include different objects inside other applications was included on Microsoft Windows nine years after, in 1990, when they created the OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) based on Xerox Star concepts.
We can see the result of t incredible creation in the image below, where you can observe the different objects interacting with each other. Note the widgets, icons and windows:
The appearance of the GUI
Historically, in the 60s there was no graphical interface, so far, everything was based on punched cards, if not, perforated paper with algorithms and alphabets and the output was done by printers. There was no interaction with the user.
In 1962, Ivan Sutherland (was born in 1938, and he still alive until today) created in his PhD thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the thing we could say: "The first Graphic User Interface ever". Called Sketchpad, this software was the predecessor of the Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) and opened the doors to the user interface world.
The Sketchpad according to Wikipedia, using a simple interface but intuitive given the user a new experience about "operate a computer". With the touch sensitive monitor of the light pen, the user can "click" in specific regions where they designed for the options. The clickable areas were recognized in touch screen, and the terminal determines whether the area in a XY axis performed some action. Additionally, the user could draw on the screen with a Light Pen (something like a mouse today).