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Western CO | I worked for an electronic CAD company based in Boulder, CO that developed a GUI at basically the same time as Xerox. It was of course developed exclusively for that system and not as a general ap but it was none the less a very nice GUI that would have probably made it's way somewhere had there not been alternatives. This particular GUI was completely icon based without a command line interface and used an "association" concept for the icons. There were "data" icons and "action" icons and the user would move a data icon into the appropriate action icon to accomplish the task that he/she wanted to do. Originally it had a proprietary OS under it but eventually was moved over to UNIX and after that moved to an X-windows based system primarily on Sun workstations, however there was a MS windows version as well in about 3.0-3.11. So I would say that while it may not be exactly what we are used to the "windows" concept I think would have come about. I am not sure of the history of the public X-windows stuff but I think it too had it's roots in the Xerox GUI?? Probably could look it up in wiki. | |
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An interesting debate
