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Who invented the graphical user interface was it IBM, Apple or Microsoft?

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Bubble99

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Who invented the graphical user interface was it IBM, Apple or Microsoft?
I'm wondering when the GUI got started and who had the best looking GUI at the time?

I hear Windows 3.1 came out in 1992. But in the 80s DOS was used lot by IBM and Microsoft.

I hear there was Atari computer and had OS in 1985 and Amiga computer and had OS in 1985 as well. But Microsoft took over the market shares with DOS.
The Atari OS in 1985 seems pretty basic at the time.

1777852811647.png


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The Amiga computers had GUI in 1985

AmigaOS 1.0 was released with the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. The 1.x versions of AmigaOS by default used a blue and orange color scheme, designed to give high contrast on even the worst of television screens

1777853008871.png


Note Atari computers seem more ahead at the time and OS better than Amiga.
 
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Don’t know what happen to SunOS or Commodore 64.

The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bithome computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas).<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#cite_note-4"><span>[</span>4<span>]</span></a> It has been listed in the Guinness World Recordsas the best-selling desktop computer model of all time,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#cite_note-guinessworldrecords.com-5"><span>[</span>5<span>]</span></a>with independent estimates placing the number sold between 12.5 and 17 million units
 
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Bubble99 said:
Who invented the graphical user interface was it IBM, Apple or Microsoft?
I'm wondering when the GUI got started and who had the best looking GUI at the time?

I hear Windows 3.1 came out in 1992. But in the 80s DOS was used lot by IBM and Microsoft.

I hear there was Atari computer and had OS in 1985 and Amiga computer and had OS in 1985 as well. But Microsoft took over the market shares with DOS.
The Atari OS in 1985 seems pretty basic at the time.

View attachment 2627077

——

The Amiga computers had GUI in 1985

AmigaOS 1.0 was released with the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. The 1.x versions of AmigaOS by default used a blue and orange color scheme, designed to give high contrast on even the worst of television screens

View attachment 2627078

Note Atari computers seem more ahead at the time and OS better than Amiga.
Click to expand...
These threads you are making are all questions you could quickly answer with a Google search. What’s the point of asking here?
 
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For testing we installed a 14-workstation Xerox Star ethernet network back in the early ‘80s. The ethernet cables were 1” thick, and the workstation generated enough heat to keep the office warm in the coldest winters. But the GUI was life-changing, as was interoperability among workstations ushering in a whole lot of learning (token-ring network topology was still a thing for IBM shops, for example), and potential productivity strides. Fun times indeed.
 
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none of them, IIRC it was Xerox


I had an amiga 500. I miss the amiga. Still. IN another universe it would have wiped the floor with the Mac, but commodore were too slow to update the custom chips in it.

While the Mac was running monochrome graphics via CPU, the Amiga had 4096 colours and hardware sprites, etc.

While the Mac had single channel audio, the amiga had 4 channel stereo.

I mean this ran on original Amiga hardware from 1987 assuming you had 512K

 
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theluggage said:
Not the whole GUI concept (that would be Xerox), but a lot of the underpinnings of modern human/computer interaction (including the mouse) were demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute during “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968:

Click to expand...

But at the time in the 80s Microsoft and IBM where using DOS well Apple never had any thing like that it was all GUI in the 80s Apple was using.

I can’t image Steve Jobs allowing command line on their computers.
 
Bubble99 said:
But at the time in the 80s Microsoft and IBM where using DOS well Apple never had any thing like that it was all GUI in the 80s Apple was using.
Click to expand...

Apple sold more text/command-line models in the 1980s than GUI-based models.

The Apple IIe, Apple III, and Apple IIc were command line-driven and all debuted in the 1980s. The IIe and IIc were sold into the early 1990s.

The Macintosh and Apple IIgs were GUI-driven and debuted in 1984 and 1986, respectively.

The IIgs was Apple's first color GUI, and meant as a competitor to the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, but was glacially slow and hampered by its buggy OS and high price.
 
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edubfromktown said:
At Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)... Ethernet was invented there too!
Click to expand...

It interesting because Windows 1.0 came out in 1985

Windows 1.0 is the first major release of Microsoft Windows, a family of graphical user shells and operating systems for personal computers developed by Microsoft. It was first released to manufacturingin the United States and the general public on November 20, 1985

1777904093993.png



The Atari OS GUI looked nicer than other two screenshots here of the GUI.
 
Bubble99 said:
It interesting because Windows 1.0 came out in 1985
Click to expand...

As oer my previous post, windows (small-w) mice etc. were first demonstrated publicly in 1968.

The Xerox "Star" came out in 1981:
... it was a serious-callers-only workstation that cost as much as a small house (at the time) but it introduced the GUI.

The Apple Lisa came out in 1983, and while it was a commercial flop it received enormous press coverage and popularised the idea of the GUI and probably helped prime the market for the Mac in 1984.

The original Windows 1 was very different from the progressively more Mac-like Windows 2 and 3 - and while it did have graphics and icons it has as much in common with text-mode task switchers like TopView and DesqView.

Bubble99 said:
The Atari OS GUI looked nicer than other two screenshots here of the GUI.
Click to expand...
If you got the Atari ST with the high-res monochrome display option (640x400 @ 70Hz) then the GUI looked as if it had been separated from the Macintosh/Lisa at birth. The Atari ST was nicknamed the "Jackintosh" for a reason.

The ST's colour display modes were rather low resolution (plus, colour wasn't a thing in the Mac at the time) so it looks less impressive.

The Atari ST ran the Digital Research GEM GUI - which was also available for PCs & a competitor with Windows in the early days. Digital Research ended up being sued by Apple for copying the Mac "look and feel". Subsequent PC versions of GEM had to be knobbled to make them less Mac-like - but the Atari ST version survived unscathed (ironic, really, because it was the ST that was an obvious Mac competitor).

Bubble99 said:
But at the time in the 80s Microsoft and IBM where using DOS well Apple never had any thing like that it was all GUI in the 80s Apple was using.
Click to expand...
As mentioned, the Apple II line was command-line based and continued selling into the 1990s.
But, yes, the Mac went all-in with the GUI, except...

Bubble99 said:
I can’t image Steve Jobs allowing command line on their computers.
Click to expand...

LOL. Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, the NeXTStep OS had a fancy GUI but absolutely had a command line option. Then he went back to Apple and NeXTStep became the basis for MacOS X. Which also has a command line option (Terminal).
 
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Bubble99 said:
But at the time in the 80s Microsoft and IBM where using DOS well Apple never had any thing like that it was all GUI in the 80s Apple was using.

I can’t image Steve Jobs allowing command line on their computers.
Click to expand...
NextStep which was Steve's computer system he came up with when he was not part of Apple, had a command line. Naturally because it was based on BSD Unix. And the shell is a big part of Unix even if you have a GUI. NextStep was developed into OSX when Jobs came back to Apple. OSX also had 'terminal' for command line access. As does the current MacOS.
 
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More interesting to me was the 1994 movie Disclosure, with Michael Douglas, first showing 3D Virtual Computer Access.
 
Bubble99 said:
Note Atari computers seem more ahead at the time and OS better than Amiga.
Click to expand...
No way was the Atari "ahead" of the Amiga (...and I had an Atari for a while, so I'm not fanboying).

The Amiga was probably the most sophisticated personal computer (i.e. not counting workstations with 5-digit prices) around at the time.

Yeah, the GUI looked a bit fugly but - as someone else mentioned - it was designed to work with TVs.

It had a true multitasking operating system (remarkable for the price), hardware for sampled sound, better graphics than the ST or contemporary PCs including "blitter" hardware accelerations for fast bitmapped graphics... it went on to be used extensively in TV graphics and compositing - famously used to make the early seasons of Babylon 5.

The Atari had a similar 68k processor & came with a bargain amount of RAM, but apart from that was pretty basic. The operating system was single-tasking (basically a CP/M or DOS workalike) with the GEM GUI shell on top providing "collaborative multi-tasking" (c.f. the true "pre-emptive multi-tasking" on the Amiga). What made it look serious was the aforementioned high-res monochrome display which made the UI look like a Mac. Bit of a pain, though, because it was truly black & white - no greyscale - and you literally had to plug in a different monitor to play games or run painting software.
 
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Corefile said:
Steve got the idea from Xerox PARC in 1979 when he saw a demo.
Click to expand...
Yup, I still have a copy of the Byte magazine article interviewing Jobs where he states that when he saw the Xerox PARC demo he saw the future and changed the OS being developed for the Lisa to a GUI, emulating the Xerox Alto.
 
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