The Majestic Birth of Graphical User Interfaces – Xerox Alto and the Alto Trek game
The Majestic Birth of Graphical User Interfaces – Xerox Alto and the Alto Trek game
Can you imagine a time before the Graphical User Interface, when you could only operate a computer with abstract-looking text instead of using simple menus, and it was unheard of to use the oh-so-c…
Can you imagine a time before the Graphical User Interface, when you could only operate a computer with abstract-looking text instead of using simple menus, and it was unheard of to use the oh-so-common mouse? A time when computers were harder to learn, and even harder to master? Well then, join us on our splendid trip where we’ll discover one of the very first GUIs in a personal computer, found on the Xerox Alto!
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Can I imagine? Yeah, I lived it. Even Internet browsers used to be text only. My first modem was <1 kbit/s. (For contrast, the last dial-up modem speeds were 56,000 kbit/s, and today speeds are often 1,000,000 kbit/s or more.)
The mouse came before graphical OSes for me, since games used it but games were executed from the command line MS-DOS. Of course DOS was also capable of using a mouse. I didn't really use an OS GUI until Windows 3.1, which was mostly a novelty at first. That came out in the early '90s. I didn't have any exposure to Macs until System 7 in the mid-'90s.
My daily driver these days is a MacBook Pro. We've come a long way!
It's impressive how fast our modems are compared to the 1kbit/s one! And yes, we've come a long way, and it's nice to look back at these things sometimes.