A pearl of gooey awesomeness

For those of you who don’t know, part of my job involves coding and designing the GUI for several systems currently used by the Navy. I work with older systems because of hardware constraints (remember HP-10.20 anyone?)  which tends towards more headaches than there needs to be. After an ardent discussion with some of my coworkers, I was perusing the web trying to prove a point about interface design and discovered this  pearl of awesomeness on Webdesigner Depot. Yep, it’s a chronology of OS interfaces from 1981-2009. It includes everything from Xerox’s PARC (the very first GUI and a contender for the most obscure exam question I had in school) to the latest and greatest Mac/Windows/Gnome/KDE interfaces. It’s interesting to note how little has changed over the years as well as the seemingly constant use of blue and green in the default color schemes. The basic window design introduced with Xerox 8010 is almost identical to that used today. Similarly, the taskbar has remained the same since Windows ‘95 outside of placement and the Mac dock variation. If you’d like to check out more GUI history and design, be sure to look at the links they’ve included in their acknowledgements, especially Nathan Toasty’s in-depth GUI timeline and considerable collection of screenshots. Oh and in case you’re wondering, I both won and lost my argument. I won because I was mostly right and lost because “…that’s how it’s been done for years.” Go figure.

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