How the GUI was invented

A video essay from the Interface Studies channel on the history of the graphical user interface, framing it as a wonderful curse. It follows how the GUI came about and what it gave and took from computer users.

A film demonstration of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, the software from his 1963 MIT thesis for drawing on a screen with a light pen. It shows constraints, snapping to objects and reusable drawings, early ideas of interactive graphics.

Douglas Engelbart's 1968 live demonstration of the oNLine System (NLS) at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. It shows the mouse, windows, hypertext links, shared-screen collaboration, outlining and video conferencing, all framed as tools to augment human intellect.

At the Computer History Museum, Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk-76 running on a restored Xerox Alto and answers questions about it. The session runs about two hours and shows early overlapping windows, menus and a programmable desktop.

Larry Tesler demonstrates Gypsy, the non-modal document editor built at Xerox PARC, running on a restored Xerox Alto at the Computer History Museum. It shows text editing with a mouse, selection and cut and paste as they worked in the 1970s.

A 1982 demonstration, part one of two, of the Xerox Star user interface. It shows the desktop, icons, windows and mouse use, together with dedicated keys for commands such as copy, find and repeat.

The second part of a 1982 demonstration of the Xerox Star user interface, posted by VintageCG. It shows the Star's document and text editing, with its icons, windows and mouse-driven commands.

A Vintage Computer Federation East presentation comparing the Xerox Star and the Apple Lisa, two early commercial graphical desktops. It looks at how each machine's interface worked and where the two differed.

A 1997 Computer History Museum talk in which Larry Tesler recounts how the Apple Lisa and Macintosh user interface came about. He covers the design decisions and the people behind the early desktop interface, with overhead foils as slides.

Larry Tesler, a scientist at Xerox PARC, recalls Steve Jobs's famous visits to PARC, where Apple saw the Alto's graphical interface. It is a short interview clip about how that exchange fed into Apple's work.

Bill Atkinson, the Apple engineer behind much of the Lisa and Macintosh interface, shows Polaroids he took of the Lisa GUI as it evolved. The Computer History Museum video walks through prototypes and mockups of the early interface.

A full-length documentary on the Apple Lisa, the 1983 computer that preceded the Macintosh. It covers how the Lisa and its graphical interface were made.

A 1984 Computer Chronicles segment in which Susan Kare, the designer of the original Macintosh icons and fonts, explains and demonstrates the Mac's interface. It shows the desktop, windows and control panel at a time when most viewers had never seen a graphical computer.

A Computer History Museum event where Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld talk about MacPaint and demonstrate it. MacPaint was the Macintosh's original drawing program, written by Atkinson.

Steve Jobs gives a half-hour demonstration of NeXTSTEP Release 3 from around 1992. It shows the object-oriented environment and its interface builder for assembling graphical applications that talk to a database.

The first part of a documentary series on the rise of Microsoft Windows, covering the development of Windows 1.0 from 1981 to 1985. It follows the effort and false starts behind the first release.

A 1986 Microsoft promotional video in which Steve Ballmer walks through Windows 1.0 in a high-energy sales pitch. This is a high-quality restoration of the tape, which turned out to be an internal parody.

A demo of Magic Cap, the pocket-computer interface from General Magic, recorded in January 1994 and posted by Andy Hertzfeld, who worked on it. It shows the room-and-objects metaphor the software used in place of a conventional desktop.

A 1992 demo by James Gosling of Sun's Star7, an early handheld device with a colour touchscreen and an animated interface featuring Duke, later Java's mascot. It shows touch interaction, including dragging and scrolling, years before smartphones.

Jeff Han demonstrates his multi-touch sensing display at TED in 2006, with several fingers manipulating photos, maps and other objects directly on a large screen. The demo, which pre-dated the iPhone, showed pinch to zoom, dragging and other gestures as a natural way to interact.