History of the Graphical User Interface: The Rise (and Fall?) Of WIMP Design(uxtigers.com)
uxtigers.com
History of the Graphical User Interface: The Rise (and Fall?) Of WIMP Design
https://www.uxtigers.com/post/gui-history
15 comments
Such a long, long article breaking down the rise and fall of human computer interaction (GUIs/WIMP) and the future of AI interfaces; yet no mention of command line interfaces or NLP seems like quite an omission, especially since this is kinda how we're interfacing with AI currently.
Classic WIMP paradigm arguably lost dominance already in late 00s/early 10s. Windows 8, Office 2007, Gnome 3, iPhone, web applications, all were exploring new stuff and breaking conventions. And then you also have the skeuomorphism fad, and lots of other little things.
It is also noteworthy that even at the height of WIMP era lot of user interaction was driven by keyboard shortcuts, arguably even more than these days. In many ways WIMP was training wheels instead of the primary interaction model.
It is also noteworthy that even at the height of WIMP era lot of user interaction was driven by keyboard shortcuts, arguably even more than these days. In many ways WIMP was training wheels instead of the primary interaction model.
Slop. The illustrations are bad, the article is way too long, and none of it has a clear point.
I've seen footage of the Mother Of All Demos, and plenty of material depicting a real Xerox Alto exists online. It's too bad none of that material made it into the article, but AI-generated facsimiles did.
AI images in general are a red flag in articles, but these ones additionally push me to go elsewhere for information.
AI images in general are a red flag in articles, but these ones additionally push me to go elsewhere for information.
Tbf, the author declares this right at the beginning:
> (I made all the comics in this article with Nano Banana Pro.)
I don't see any strong evidence for the article being AI-written, however. Given the author, I would be very disappointed if it were.
> (I made all the comics in this article with Nano Banana Pro.)
I don't see any strong evidence for the article being AI-written, however. Given the author, I would be very disappointed if it were.
> (I made all the comics in this article with Nano Banana Pro.)
At least he says it I guess. But it was clearly slop pictures from the first one. I already knew before I read it.
Blogs everywhere are now going hard on this. It is not endearing.
At least he says it I guess. But it was clearly slop pictures from the first one. I already knew before I read it.
Blogs everywhere are now going hard on this. It is not endearing.
It's sucrose to being a good sweet article. Really though it should be used as a draft for something that wasn't just vibed. Eg fix the mice and loose the sparks from cutting wood.
The worst thing is that it is possible to correct areas of an AI generated image that are bad or inconsistent. That wasn't even done at all.
Examples of bad areas include the Menu Bar superhero (garbled text), and the keyboards (some nonsense numpads).
Examples of bad areas include the Menu Bar superhero (garbled text), and the keyboards (some nonsense numpads).
I think the garbled menu accidentally perfectly illustrates what most menus look like within the brain as it tries to sift through poorly organized heaps of obscure words to find the one word that's actually needed in the moment.
World models do not belong here, or at least, we're still some years from figuring out how they would. If I want to text my wife I can imagine just telling my phone that somehow rather than using the current UI paradigm, but what "world model" am I going to pull up that is helpful to do that? World models belong in their own stream, along with rendering in general (movies, etc.), games, VR, and other similar things that we do not today classify as UI, for good reason.
In fact I suspect "world models" may let us re-experience some idiocy from yesteryear we thought we had put behind us, like [1]. Can't wait to go "shopping" in a "world model" of a store again! However do I survive in 2026 merely zipping around the store buying my favorite items off of my favorite's list as fast as I can think of the items and using search on the thousands of available items rather than WASD'ing my way through a "model" of the store.
By contrast I think the browser is undersold. GUI toolkits existed before browsers, but they were all based on widget layouts. That is, the top level of the widget hierarchy would be some layout engine, which had components, which had subcomponents, which had a widget, etc. Some were more dynamic and relative, some used a lot of absolute positioning, but they were all structured in this way. Browsers introduced a new paradigm, where textual layout was the "top level" of the tree, and the widgets all fit within that. Prior to a browser, a Mad Lib-style game where you have text boxes interspersed in a bunch of text was quite difficult. Many GUI toolkits would have required an individual absolutely-laid-out pane for each game you want to play because it couldn't do its own layout on interspersed text and widgets at all; most if not all of them (perhaps Tk excepted, though I'm not familiar with what it could do in the 1990s as I picked it up later) would have made heavy weather of it if they could do it. (Although GUIs made heavy weather of things in general before browsers.) Now all the GUI toolkits have a lot more support for textual-layout like browsers and of course the browsers have carried on like crazy.
AIs-running-in-browsers seem a very powerful paradigm to continue forward with.
With regard to the "world model" I would see "augmented reality" being the major move forward there. It has consistently failed for a long time but I think there's a very plausible case to be made that it was just premature tech, that it doesn't work without the powerful AIs that only recently came out and are still pretty hard to stuff on to a realtime platform. That will start to enable some very interesting UI paradigms here at some point. But that still really doesn't replace WIMPs, it's more a new frontier entirely. Again, I don't necessarily want to "use augmented reality" to text my wife. AR may prompt for it in some particular circumstance, but if I'm originating one out of the blue I'm going to use a conventional UI to do that, not try to wrangle AR into it.
[1]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35440
In fact I suspect "world models" may let us re-experience some idiocy from yesteryear we thought we had put behind us, like [1]. Can't wait to go "shopping" in a "world model" of a store again! However do I survive in 2026 merely zipping around the store buying my favorite items off of my favorite's list as fast as I can think of the items and using search on the thousands of available items rather than WASD'ing my way through a "model" of the store.
By contrast I think the browser is undersold. GUI toolkits existed before browsers, but they were all based on widget layouts. That is, the top level of the widget hierarchy would be some layout engine, which had components, which had subcomponents, which had a widget, etc. Some were more dynamic and relative, some used a lot of absolute positioning, but they were all structured in this way. Browsers introduced a new paradigm, where textual layout was the "top level" of the tree, and the widgets all fit within that. Prior to a browser, a Mad Lib-style game where you have text boxes interspersed in a bunch of text was quite difficult. Many GUI toolkits would have required an individual absolutely-laid-out pane for each game you want to play because it couldn't do its own layout on interspersed text and widgets at all; most if not all of them (perhaps Tk excepted, though I'm not familiar with what it could do in the 1990s as I picked it up later) would have made heavy weather of it if they could do it. (Although GUIs made heavy weather of things in general before browsers.) Now all the GUI toolkits have a lot more support for textual-layout like browsers and of course the browsers have carried on like crazy.
AIs-running-in-browsers seem a very powerful paradigm to continue forward with.
With regard to the "world model" I would see "augmented reality" being the major move forward there. It has consistently failed for a long time but I think there's a very plausible case to be made that it was just premature tech, that it doesn't work without the powerful AIs that only recently came out and are still pretty hard to stuff on to a realtime platform. That will start to enable some very interesting UI paradigms here at some point. But that still really doesn't replace WIMPs, it's more a new frontier entirely. Again, I don't necessarily want to "use augmented reality" to text my wife. AR may prompt for it in some particular circumstance, but if I'm originating one out of the blue I'm going to use a conventional UI to do that, not try to wrangle AR into it.
[1]: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35440
Disgusting AI-generated slop. Lacks style, effort and authenticity.
He is dearly in need of an editor. There's probably some useful insight in there somewhere, but his writing is way too long and absolutely full of every type of AI generated media (even including cringe music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WDK-YYbLYg).
It's sad to see.