The Real History of the GUI

The story is part of the computer world’s mythology. December 1979, an ordinary afternoon: young computer whiz and entrepreneur Steve Jobs leads a band of his homeys into the rarefied enclave of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Jobs and friends tour the plant with wide-eyed admiration, doing their best Norman Rockwell gee-whiz kids-in-the-dugout impression (“Golly, Dr. Kay, can we have your autograph, huh?”), while behind guileless eyes and black-framed glasses, mental notes are being taken and schematics memorized.

Jobs leads his friends out of the building, waves bye-bye to the nice lab geeks inside, and dashes back to his shabby warehouse, where he and cohort Steve Wozniak stuff every idea and process they can remember from the Xerox tour into their new product, the Macintosh. Xerox is befuddled, Microsoft’s Bill Gates is enraged, and Apple gets the jump on everyone with a new dance craze, the GUI. “Do the GUI” sweeps the computer world and everybody else scrambles to get on the gravy train. Gates takes Jobs’ thievery one step beyond Jobs’ own and brings out Apple-clone Windows, Microsoft does a pas de deux with the local judiciary to dodge an Apple lawsuit, Windows takes over the world, and Apple is relegated to cult status among the renegade hackers and Mac addicts of the computer industry.

Nice story to read your kids to sleep with. It has everything: drama, criminal behavior, ruthless rivalry between former associates, everything except sex (which the stereotyped computer geeks are unfamiliar with, anyway). Hell, it would even make a good David Allen Coe drinking song. The only problem with it is that it isn’t true.

The Real History of the GUI

The real history of the Graphical User Interface is more complex and interwoven than the simplistic “It Takes a Thief” conception.

From Small Seeds...

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’s garage in 1976. Jobs and Wozniak met at Hewlett-Packard and began their collaborative careers by building (Wozniak) and selling (Jobs) “blue boxes” illegal devices that scammed free phone calls from Ma Bell. Both shared an interest in the “primitive” computers of the time and enjoyed cobbling together electronic goodies with solder and breadboards. Eventually they decided to start a company and build computers that wouldn’t take up an entire basement, didn’t need supercooling, and didn’t require platoons of guys in jumpsuits to take care of them. In other words, they envisioned building personal computers for the masses. Of course, neither Jobs nor Wozniak were the first to think of personal desktop-sized computers (common wisdom gives that honor to the MITS “Altair,” a 1975 kit-based creation running Microsoft’s BASIC OS and based on Intel’s 8080 chip), but that’s another story. They put their heads together and decided to call their company Apple.

In March 1976, Wozniak built the first Apple, the Apple I. It was a cobbled-together curiosity made of circuit boards and LED displays stuffed into a wooden box, but it stirred enough interest in the computing community to inspire Jobs and Wozniak to found Apple on April Fools’ Day, 1976 to sell their little beasties. Jobs sold his VW minibus, and Wozniak his HP scientific calculator, to finance the startup. They only managed to sell about 200 of the Apple I’s, so the fledgling company – now consisting of Wozniak, Jobs, and a few friends/employees – used the money they managed to raise from Apple I sales to start work on the Apple II (Wozniak has reputedly said that a large part of his desire to build the Apple II was due to “Breakout,” a classic video game he had designed for Atari. Wozniak wanted to program it for a PC). In 1977 the Apple II debuted, featuring a sleek plastic case (as opposed to the “orange crates” that houses the Apple I’s), game paddles, and color graphics on the video display. Being descendants of Ugh, people were fascinated by the bright colors and the flickering images, and the Apple II began to move off the shelves.

Jobs realized that he had started something that could mushroom into a serious business concern, and he laid on more employees, more workspace, and buckled down to the task of meeting the sudden consumer demand for his goodies. When Apple added the inboard floppy disk in 1977 (abandoning the slow and clumsy tape storage facility), the II‘s sales really took off, and Apple was suddenly at the crest of a wave of interest in personal computing. Never mind that many novices bought an Apple II without a clear idea of what to do with it… the mere concept of the average Joe being able to own and operate a “personal computer” was catching people’s imaginations.

Which brings us to Jobs’ infamous trek to Xerox’s PARC facility. Actually, we need to look further back in time to set the stage for Jobs’ visit.