Stop Me If You’ve Seen This Before…
A colleague from my old company passed on a link to OS GUI timelines. You can see release dates, versions, and (of course) screenshots from different OS’es.
What’s fascinating is how little GUI’s have changed in 25 years. For example, look at these screenshots from Apple’s Lisa Office System. Check out the desktop in particular (below). How different is that than your current desktop? Not so much, I’d venture to guess.
(Click picture to see full-sized)
If you’ve read my post and followup about how I think the desktop metaphor is broken, you’ll understand my mixed feelings about this stability. Like I say in those posts, I think the desktop metaphor is tired. Both MS and Apple (and various versions of *nix, for that matter) have tried to improve the basic desktop metaphor, but at best their efforts have only made slight incremental improvements to the desktop experience.
I believe that the major players in the OS and productivity app spaces have a fundamental misunderstanding of what would improve the computer desktop. It’s about workflow and managing your “projects”, whether your project is a software application, the bowling league, or your kid’s carpool schedule.
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