Early efforts Ivan Sutherland developed
Sketchpad in 1963, widely held as the first graphical
computer-aided design program. It used a
light pen to create and manipulate objects in engineering drawings in realtime with coordinated graphics. In the late 1960s, researchers at the
Stanford Research Institute, led by
Douglas Engelbart, developed the
On-Line System (NLS), which used text-based
hyperlinks manipulated with a then-new device: the
mouse. (A 1968 demonstration of NLS became known as "
The Mother of All Demos".) In the 1970s, Engelbart's ideas were further refined and extended to graphics by researchers at
Xerox PARC and specifically
Alan Kay, who went beyond text-based hyperlinks and used a GUI as the main interface for the
Smalltalk programming language, which ran on the
Xerox Alto computer, released in 1973. Most modern general-purpose GUIs are derived from this system. The Xerox PARC GUI consisted of graphical elements such as
windows,
menus,
radio buttons, and
check boxes. The concept of
icons was later introduced by
David Canfield Smith, who had written a thesis on the subject under the guidance of Kay. The PARC GUI employs a
pointing device along with a keyboard. These aspects can be emphasized by using the alternative term and acronym for
windows, icons, menus, pointing device (
WIMP). This effort culminated in the 1973
Xerox Alto, the first computer with a GUI, though the system never reached commercial production. The first commercially available computer with a GUI was the 1979
PERQ workstation, manufactured by Three Rivers Computer Corporation. Its design was heavily influenced by the work at Xerox PARC. In 1981, Xerox eventually commercialized the ideas from the Alto in the form of a new and enhanced system – the Xerox 8010 Information System – more commonly known as the
Xerox Star. These early systems spurred many other GUI efforts, including
Lisp machines by
Symbolics and other manufacturers, the
Apple Lisa (which presented the concept of
menu bar and
window controls) in 1983, the
Apple Macintosh 128K in 1984, and the
Atari ST with
Digital Research's
GEM, and Commodore
Amiga in 1985.
Visi On was released in 1983 for the
IBM PC compatible computers, but was never popular due to its high hardware demands. Nevertheless, it was a crucial influence on the contemporary development of
Microsoft Windows. Apple, Digital Research, IBM and Microsoft used many of Xerox's ideas to develop products, and IBM's
Common User Access specifications formed the basis of the GUIs used in Microsoft Windows, IBM
OS/2 Presentation Manager, and the Unix
Motif toolkit and
window manager. These ideas evolved to create the interface found in current versions of Microsoft Windows, and in various
desktop environments for
Unix-like operating systems, such as macOS and
Linux. Thus most current GUIs have largely common idioms.
Popularization running on a
HP 200LX The early 1980s saw growing interest in GUIs. The
Apple Lisa was released in 1983, but was expensive and commercially unsuccessful. Individual applications for many platforms presented their own GUI variants. Despite the GUI's advantages, many reviewers questioned the value of the entire concept, citing hardware limits and problems in finding compatible software. In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh via
a television commercial during
Super Bowl XVIII, with
allusions to
George Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The goal of the commercial was to make people think about computers, identifying the user-friendly interface as a personal computer which departed from prior business-oriented systems, and becoming a signature representation of Apple products. The 1985
Atari ST shipped with the
GEM GUI from
Digital Research, which was also published for
MS-DOS. The
Amiga 1000 was released the same year, though not widely available until 1986, with the
Workbench graphical desktop. This interface ran as a separate task, meaning it was very responsive and, unlike other GUIs of the time, it did not freeze up when a program was busy.
Windows 95, accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign, was a major success in the marketplace at launch and shortly became the most popular desktop operating system. In 2007, with the
iPhone and later in 2010 with the introduction of the
iPad, Apple popularized the post-WIMP style of interaction for
multi-touch screens, and those devices were considered to be milestones in the development of
mobile devices. The GUIs familiar to most people as of the mid-late 2010s are
Windows,
macOS, and the
X Window System interfaces for desktop and laptop computers, and
Android, Apple's
iOS,
Symbian,
BlackBerry OS,
Windows Phone/
Windows 10 Mobile,
Tizen,
WebOS, and
Firefox OS for handheld (
smartphone) devices. == Comparison to other interfaces ==