The graphical user interface (GUI) is commonplace on all computing devices today, but this was not true in the early days of computing. For the most part, to operate a computer you can to type commands.
Some computers had a command-line, such as those that used CP/M or DOS. Others would use BASIC as the interface, such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II. With the Atari 8-bit computers, you typed DOS in BASIC to load the DOS menu or command line (there were lots of variations).
The problem with having to type commands is that you have to know what the commands are. This made early computers inscrutable to people that were not tech nerds and was a big detriment to overall computer usage.
This problem had been known for a long time and many people and teams had been working on an alternative. Nearly all of them since have been based on a tech demo from 1968 by Douglas Engelbart. This demo was called “The Mother of All Demos” because it introduced so many concepts that we still use today, including the mouse, hypertext, video chat, networking, a graphic user interface and much more.
This video is absolutely worth the watch. It is truly hard to believe the things in it that were demonstrated in 1968.
From the amazing things pioneered in this video, the next group to make some inroads into graphic user interfaces was Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). They designed a graphical user interface and computer (the Xerox Alto) that refined many of the concepts from the Mother of All Demos into something more practical.
Subscribe for free to get weekly retro computing articles!
However, being a research facility, PARC was not able to turn its computer or creation into an a commercial product. Famously, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates each got wind of what PARC was doing and were able to get a tour and demo of the research.
These concepts were eventually used to create the original Mac OS and Windows operating systems.
The Macintosh was the first low-cost computer (relatively speaking as it was $2400 in 1984, which is about $7800 in 2026) with a graphical user interface, but Apple had actually released another computer a year earlier with a GUI. This computer was the Lisa and it was a flop, mostly due to its $10,000 starting price. It did however serve as a great proving grounds for the concepts that allowed the Macintosh to eventually succeed.
During this time Microsoft was working on its own GUI, which it called Windows. Work on Windows was slow, but Windows 1.0 did ship in late 1985, almost two years after the Macintosh. Windows 1.0 was mostly terrible, but it was refined over the years and by v3.0 it was able to get market acceptance in the PC world.
But Apple and Microsoft were not the only companies interested in graphical user interfaces.
IBM had a product called TopView that was a GUI that was released in early 1985. Like Windows, it ran on top of DOS, but unlike Windows it never really caught on. It was abandoned around 1990 as OS/2 had the focus by that time.
Another lesser-known GUI was Visi On, created by VisiCorp the makers of the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc. First announced in late 1983, it beat most other GUIs to market but it may have had the problem of being too early. As it was released before the Macintosh, few had any idea what a GUI was or why it was better than the command lines of that era. Just a month or so later, Macintosh debuted and stole any momentum it may have had. And then VisiCorp itself ran into troubles in 1985.
Perhaps the GUI with the best chance to compete with Macintosh and Windows was Digital Research’s GEM (Graphics Environment Manager). Released in early 1985, GEM showed great promise. Unlike VisiCorp, Digital Research had years of experience in OS development with its popular CP/M operating system. At the time, Digital Research was a well-regarded company.
And GEM actually looked pretty good for the time. Unfortunately it looked too good. Apple sued Digital Research for copyright infringement and the settlement forced DR to sufficiently alter GEM enough to make it less appealing. That, combined with Microsoft Windows continuing to be revised and improved, led to GEM’s demise.
On notable thing about GEM is that it was chosen by Atari to use as the OS for its ST computers. In late 1984, Atari and Digital Research engineers ported early versions of GEM from x86 to the 68000 CPU used by the ST and had a working version by early 1985. When the ST shipped in the summer of 1985, it was running an OS that used GEMDOS and GEM as its foundation.
These days, GEM is open-source and their is an project called EmuTOS that is an open-source version of the Atari ST OS (TOS) with GEM compatibility.
Around the same time the Amiga was introduced and it came with its own GUI called Intuition. I never really liked the way the Amiga GUI looked, but it was apparently highly functional and did work with the multitasking Amiga OS, something that was unique as the time.
For the most part, GUI systems needed powerful computers and high-resolution graphics so were largely limited to 16-bit computers. But for a little while, a product called GEOS brought a GUI to the 8-bit Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I always thought GEOS was more of a gimmick on the C64, but it worked OK on the C128, assuming you were able to use it with an RGB monitor to get the better graphics resolutions.
Even the Atari 8-bit had a GUI, although it was not well-known. Diamond Graphical OS (Diamond GOS) was released by a 3rd party in 1988 and was designed to look like GEM.
The mid 80s were largely a void of GUI acceptance in the PC world. DOS was king and PC users would often belittle any GUI as a toy. It really wasn’t until Windows 3 in 1990 that GUIs on PCs started to gain traction. Essentially, Windows outlasted everything else to become the PC standard!
But GUI development didn’t stop in the 90s. NeXT came out with NeXTStep (and then OpenStep) a GUI that ran on top of Unix and that became the foundation for today’s macOS.
BeOS burned brightly for a short while, but when it didn’t get selected as the basis for the next Mac OS, it fizzled out.
In fact, Windows was so dominant after Windows 95 was released that it almost made Apple and the Mac irrelevant. Windows 95 was certainly not as elegant as Mac OS, but it was good enough for most people and readily available on much cheaper PCs. By 1997 Apple was in dire straits, but was fortunately able to turn things around just in time1.
I use a Mac most of the time these days, so I’m glad Windows didn’t completely win, but at least from a desktop GUI standpoint I guess it did win. Mac OS accounts for about 16% of computer usage, Linux for 4% and Windows at a whopping 71%2. The remaining 10% is scattered across unknown OSes, which could be one of the above or something like Chrome OS.
Of course, GUI development evolved beyond desktop computers to mobile computing devices and Microsoft did not fare so well there…3
At first release - GEM did indeed seem a little more "polished" than the Amiga. But I can't say enough about the Amiga's ground breaking, full-on, honest to goodness real multithreaded multi-tasking. That alone made it worth the somewhat "meh" UI.
OS/2 was very polished. It was also quite the resource hog. I gave it a go, but ultimately got the nope.
BeOS was indeed quite stunning - I think it could have easily become MacOS. But then we'd have missed out on the second coming of Jobs and all that brought to Apple, as well as a fully POSIX compliant OS that we got with OS X.
Beautiful article! I didn't know about quite a few of those, and that video of the old presentation is remarkable.
One operating system not included in your article is Risc OS, which was designed for Acorn computers in the 1980s. Acorn grew out of the BBC Micro, a government-backed project to get computers into classrooms and homes. The Acorn Archimedes A3000 was my first computer, and I remember being confused as a child that my home computer had such an easy GUI while my father's work PC still had a clunky DOS interface.
I continued using Risc OS through the 90s, until Acorn went bankrupt. I didn't actually switch to Windows until 2000, at which point I was rather alarmed to discover that Windows wasn't as good as the OS I'd used a decade earlier.
It wasn't until Windows 7 that I felt Microsoft had finally caught up with the OS I'd been using since the 1980s. And then they've been backsliding ever since. :D
Risc OS is still developed as open source, I think. It's available for the Raspberry Pi these days.
At first release - GEM did indeed seem a little more "polished" than the Amiga. But I can't say enough about the Amiga's ground breaking, full-on, honest to goodness real multithreaded multi-tasking. That alone made it worth the somewhat "meh" UI.
OS/2 was very polished. It was also quite the resource hog. I gave it a go, but ultimately got the nope.
BeOS was indeed quite stunning - I think it could have easily become MacOS. But then we'd have missed out on the second coming of Jobs and all that brought to Apple, as well as a fully POSIX compliant OS that we got with OS X.
Beautiful article! I didn't know about quite a few of those, and that video of the old presentation is remarkable.
One operating system not included in your article is Risc OS, which was designed for Acorn computers in the 1980s. Acorn grew out of the BBC Micro, a government-backed project to get computers into classrooms and homes. The Acorn Archimedes A3000 was my first computer, and I remember being confused as a child that my home computer had such an easy GUI while my father's work PC still had a clunky DOS interface.
I continued using Risc OS through the 90s, until Acorn went bankrupt. I didn't actually switch to Windows until 2000, at which point I was rather alarmed to discover that Windows wasn't as good as the OS I'd used a decade earlier.
It wasn't until Windows 7 that I felt Microsoft had finally caught up with the OS I'd been using since the 1980s. And then they've been backsliding ever since. :D
Risc OS is still developed as open source, I think. It's available for the Raspberry Pi these days.
More info here: https://youtu.be/sneYGad3j5I?si=9_kbo434rugQXGfZ