this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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The Majestic Birth of Graphical User Interfaces – Xerox Alto and the Alto Trek game (blisscast.wordpress.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Can you imagine a time before the Graphical User Interface, when you could only operate a computer with abstract-looking text instead of using simple menus, and it was unheard of to use the oh-so-common mouse? A time when computers were harder to learn, and even harder to master? Well then, join us on our splendid trip where we’ll discover one of the very first GUIs in a personal computer, found on the Xerox Alto!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Why is this so beautiful to me? I was born in the 80's and it just "speaks" me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Can I imagine? Yeah, I lived it. Even Internet browsers used to be text only. My first modem was <1 kbit/s. (For contrast, the last dial-up modem speeds were 56,000 kbit/s, and today speeds are often 1,000,000 kbit/s or more.)

The mouse came before graphical OSes for me, since games used it but games were executed from the command line MS-DOS. Of course DOS was also capable of using a mouse. I didn't really use an OS GUI until Windows 3.1, which was mostly a novelty at first. That came out in the early '90s. I didn't have any exposure to Macs until System 7 in the mid-'90s.

My daily driver these days is a MacBook Pro. We've come a long way!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It's impressive how fast our modems are compared to the 1kbit/s one! And yes, we've come a long way, and it's nice to look back at these things sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

And yet I still spend most of my time in a Linux terminal