Jeremy Reimer has no degree in computer science, nor even a certification such as an A+, let alone an MCSE, and he has no professional hands-on experience in the trenches actually doing the job as a software engineer or network administrator.

This lack of expertise via experience, and certifications or degrees, does not qualify him as a valid authority.

Also, Jeremy Reimer has never written a gui program in his life, and yet is cited as a reference here?

See his lack of technical expertise here, as well as his being caught impersonating others on his website, email harassing others, and having his OSY website removed by his hosting provider for his website for libel, and other misdoings:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=193...

Think twice and protect yourselves from citing this fake it till you make it type online, like Jeremy Reimer of arstechnica (home of the underachiever and liar online).

I've read the similar history descriptions of the GUI in my Management Information Systems courses. His article was fair and brief in many aspects. It was more about the birth of the computer rather than history of the GUI. He did a pretty good job though at running through technical developments of the a computer. In contrast to my MIS studies, he could have described more of the business implications of why the technology shifted away from Xerox PARC to Apple. Basically, I do not believe that Xerox dumped the computer because it wanted to stay rich in the printing industry. At the time, Xerox could not imagine the use for personal computers. They thought that only a few institutions like governments and universities would have them. So, in turns, they showcased what they had to Steve Jobs and dumped further attention and investment into the PC. As far as credibility, I'd would consult other wiki's or textbooks for more accurate data.

I also agree that it started out alright, getting adequate coverage of GUIs until the 80s, but drops off quickly after that.

As an article, I think it tried to do too much. Few people have the patience to really get into GUI history; it would have been much more successful (and possibly more accurate and interesting) as an illustrated guide to GUI history. More, larger screenshots, and just highlighting the similarities and differences in them along a timeline. Leave the politics behind their development out of it; name-dropping should have been solely to provide Wikipedia links.

As a history, it provides the same short, slighted version of GUI development that is commonplace: Apple stole the Mac UI from Xerox, MS stole it from Apple, etc. As the comments in the Ars Technica forums note, there's no mention of Jef Raskin (the original Macintosh project lead) and his contributions, and as others here have noted, there's little mention of alternative interfaces. What of the Canon Cat? What of Palm's success in PDA interfaces against the Newton and Windows CE? What of our horrific cell phone UIs?

I agree with those that are pointing out the surface-level quality of documenting the history of the GUI in this article. Everyone knows about Xerox PARC, Lisa, and OS/2. I want to know how exactly people collaborated, borrowed, and stole ideas to create the next iteration of the GUI. I would have liked to see specific problems highlighted as examples of user-interface problems, and how different people came to different (or the same) conclusions. Jeremy Reimer pointed out the mouse pointer as one of these issues, but only in an off-hand manner.

Also, though he listed the major players in the development of OS GUIs, I felt he skipped some in favor of playing up the small-time developers. What about Windows XP? Is this a hidden MS bias? XP was a significant leap in Windows GUIs (though whether for good or bad is up for debate). Also, his GUI timeline on his Conclusions page could definitely use the ol' Tufte Treatment.

I don't think this article did a great job of tracing the history of the GUI, though it was adequate for a newbie to read.

While this was without doubt the perfect article to refer my mother to about the history of the GUI, it did seem a bit shallow and I have to fully agree with Jack, Mr. Hats, and Naveed - there were some critical pieces missing, and it was a bit light on details after a huge flurry of initial information. The real problem as I see it is lack: first, of depth--for example details like usability of the API. But especially lack of breadth: he fails to address, as Naveed mentions, GUI's other than operating systems! one could forgive him if he'd titled the article "the history of the Computer-based-OS GUI", but since he did not, he should have considered a diverse group of GUI's---cell phones, calculators, and most importantly, other programs which do not follow the same model, like photoshop and opera. An example of an especially key recent GUI development that photoshop was an early user of is Single-document-interface versus Multiple Document Interface (MDI).

Further, as to the credibility of Jeremy Reimer, I was unable to verify his credentials in any capacity other than as wrtier for Ars Technica, however he is thoroughly disparaged by more than one pseudonymous internet critic in the top few google hits for his name. the unverified posters say (and he confirms on his web page, reference below) that he lacks degree or formal association with the field of CS, and this takes his credibility down a notch. He is apparently a staff writer for Ars, which might offset that, as they decidedly have geek cred. So I draw a neutral on this query..

I think that the article gave a pretty thorough treatment to the GUI up until around the mid-80's or so, but after that it started to seem quite rushed and a bit oversimplified. Granted, however, this was about the time when computers started to hit the market as a mainstream household tool, and their usage (and various implementations) exploded; to try and give a complete and thorough history of the GUI at that point would no doubt fill a good length book.

I would have liked to see a bit more said about the unix/linux side of things, and I feel as though he downplayed the importance of X. In particular he left out one of the most important features/innovations that X brought to the GUI landscape, namely it's client/server model and network transparency (allowing one to view and interact with a program on another machine in the network). Yes, it's still not too commonplace in the household (although anybody with a TiVo is using it, probably without even realizing so..:) and perhaps this would make it outside the scope of the article, but it's network transparency has allowed many large corporations to cut costs by using thin clients.

I also must say I found it rather odd that he seems to simply drop the topic of MS windows after 3.1, only briefly mentioning the fact that 95 introduced the concept of a "Start Menu" and the task bar, which were actually quite a leap. No mention whatsoever of WinXP (or the upcoming Vista) while Apple's OSX get's the glitzy last screenshot (if I had to guess I would say that Reimer is probably a Mac user...)

Overall however, I think he gave a pretty good picture of the evolving nature of the GUI; and I definately learned some new and interesting tidbits (especially about Englebert and the early interactions of Gates and Jobs)

@JackSchaedler :

You might check out some tabbed/tiled window managers like Ion3 http://www.modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/ (which I already evangelized in class), TWM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm , or RatPoison http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ that abandon many of the features (and introduce a few of their own) that one would think of as "standard" for a GUI. They are definately outside the mainstream, but seem to have retained/created a small but devoted following.

@Evelyn Chang

I don't know about current Macs, but I do remember getting "the sad mac" icon more than once... :)

@roboninja hats

w00t ArsTechnica!

And I would also have to agree that the article is definately lacking in scholarly-ness. I wouldn't cite it either, and I find his lack of sources slightly annoying.

Having grown up in Pakistan, I was not exposed to a GUI in the sense the article details at an early age. The extent of my computer knowledge when Windows 95 came out was playing Pitfall on an MS DOS based machine.

I did not use the computer for word processing. I used it as I would my SNES or Atari – to play games. My first time to use a GUI on a computer system was on a Windows 95 machine when I moved to the US in 1996. I remember being a bit confused trying to operate it at first. But as I learned more, I found the technology to be very intriguing.

With my limited background, I do believe Jeremy Reimer’s article on the history of GUI is fairly complete. He did not address GUIS in video game systems or even calculators (which are essentially mini-computers), but I do not believe that was the purpose of the articles. I learned a great deal of information on some of the earlier computer GUIS and how they came about.

Having written this extensive article, I would presume that Jeremy Reimer’s is a credible author. I believe that the main argument he made about GUIs borrowing and essentially building upon one and other was very strong. It provided me with a great insight into GUI development that I hadn’t considered before, particularly regarding the earlier version of Windows and MAC GUIs.

My main concern though lies with the point I brought up earlier: he didn’t address anything but computer GUIs. For a truly extensive article, I would have liked to see more mention of these other GUIs and even a few unconventional ones. Also, one can not talk about the past without talking about the future. The author only devoted a few paragraphs to this. Much research has been done on the future of GUIs, and I believe if the author had given a better overview of the future along with relevant links the article would be more concrete. Such an article would give a novice like me a much better understanding of GUIs in general.

I'm assuming that this article was supposed to be a very brief overview of the history of GUI's and it's intent was not to delve into the finer points of them. If that's the case, I thought the article was rather well-written. I'm actually brand new to the world of GUIs, so this article was helpful in explaining exactly what a Graphical User Interface is. I liked that the author broke the chronology of GUI development down into decades.

However, I do agree with "roboninja hats" post that the part of the article about the 80's and 90's was particularly rushed. When reading it, it felt like Reimer thought that era in GUI development was boring or he was just tired of writing the article so he basically quit.

As far as his credibility, he seems to have a ton of knowledge on GUI development, or has the means to find out all this information, so I think this is a credible article.

To begin with, ArsTechnica is a geek haven and I am willing to wager that the average Ars reader was aware of most everything that Reimer had to say and in greater detail prior to reading his article. So the post was a little out of place, but for anyone who came to the site only knowing of the OS’s that they’d experienced first hand, it is undoubtably an eye-opener. Even though a little top heavy, it's an acceptable primer. It almost feels like a number of last minute papers I have written which tend to fixate on one topic right up front and then gloss over the entire last half just hoping to make it to the page requirement. Part five through seven (80s-90s) are particularly rushed, Reimer simply throws up screen shots with about a line or two of information accompanying them. The screen shots are necessary though, it would have been foolish to exclude them from an article discussing the look of computer interfaces. It’s a shame he didn’t talk about varying input devices people have used along the way as means of interacting with the computer, granted not GUIs themselves, but so closley wedded to the original topic that I think they could have used some coverage; things like tablets, joysticks, buttons, varying keyboards, or even just a better explanation of Apple’s shift from multi-button mice to just their one button affair (the old multi-button mice did not work like the multi-button ones we have now).

As for Reimer’s credibility, I would never cite his article in a paper. If I were to make a post online somewhere I wouldn’t hessitate to recommend it to someone for a basic rundown on GUIs. But his information is so varied that I doubt it all came from his mind and he lists no sources to back any of it up. All in all I would only use this article as a jumping off point, not as an authoratative source on the subject.

I actually think Reimer did a good job giving a brief overlook over the development of GUIs. I think it's a good start for anyone who doesn't know much about the history of the GUI. I'll agree with Jack in that Reimer seemed to focus too much on GUIs for a personal computer but if you think of Reimer's article as more of a starting point for learning about GUIs it's fine. Most people would think of Windows or Apple when asked to name a graphical interface so it makes sense to focus on the OS. Also it seems like Reimer's focusing not just on educating people about the history of GUIs but also trying to display how rapidly the world of GUIs have evolved and make people appreciate GUIs more. By focusing on just operating systems that change is made more dramatic and I'm sure that anyone looking how much more sophisticated the OS has become they'd appreciate the Windows OS (or MacOS) even more. (even when you get the blue screen of death ^^ or whatever the Mac alternative is... is there one?)

I'll go ahead and take the first stab at this question. In reading both Reimer's and Stephenson's articles about the development of GUIs, I personally thought it was kind of weird how the term 'GUI' was only investigated in terms of graphical interfaces to an OS. You can find plenty of examples of graphical user interfaces that were fairly complex in applications that ran on 'pre-GUI' computer systems like the appleII and Commodore 64. Here's an example of a flight simulator gui from a 1980 appleII application.

Given the complexity of these sorts of interfaces (for their time), and the amount of user-computer interaction that these programs fostered, I'm slightly surprised to see them given such short shrift. If you are professing to give a history of graphical user interfaces like Reimer is, it seems like a you'd have to take a look at some of the GUIs presented by the actual applications that ran on each of the operating systems that are surveyed. Reading Stephenson's essay, you get the impression that any and all applications prior to the advent of the macintosh looked like no more than glowing typewriter output. Both authors fail to mention that by the 80s you have people interacting with animated graphics and all sorts of different input devices like joysticks and mice.

I certainly am not going to assert that I can pass judgment on the credibility of Jeremy Reimer, but I think the article does an alright job delivering on the promise of the 'history of the GUI'. I for one, was completely ignorant of the work done by Douglas Engelbart in the 60's. Reading about the inclusion of features like windowing, copy/paste, networking, and document collaboration in his pilot presentation was pretty neat. I did think that he spent some undue time focusing on what seem like minor points (the orientation of the mouse cursor in different GUIs, or the length of a window's title bar, double buffering windows, etc).

Surely, there must be examples of more wacky and unconventional GUI development attempts that deviate in more ways than the orientation in which windows are cascaded, or the look of their mouse pointer. I for one, would like to see more information on these attempts that haven't garnered much popularity, or fell by the wayside. It would be interesting to see how people deviated from the main trunk of GUI development, and why their designs failed to be adopted (I'll grant that the portion on Englebart does in fact address this issue to some degree).