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August 10, 2019
The desktop metaphor
Using a computer wasn't an easy task back in the day - maybe not even today. Computers were black screens with green letters. Machines that performed a single task at a time from command input in the terminal. Commands that were difficult to memorize and almost impossible to deduce.
By 1960, computers were beginning to gain some popularity outside of businesses, especially among hobbyist groups. People who spent a lot of time reading thick manuals only to be able to interact with a computer. All this complexity scared most people and was obviously a major impediment to the popularization of these fantastic machines.
A radical change in the way we interact with a computer was needed. Something more visual, closer to the reality of a human being and more distant from the low level reality of a machine. But the technology needed simply did not exist for such a paradigm break.
The mother of all demos
In science we are always leaning on the shoulders of giants. With the invention of the graphical interface it was no different. There was not really an inventor, but rather a series of improvements that were made over the previous generation.
One of the first theorists on the subject was Vannevar Bush, chief engineer of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II who, in 1945, published an article entitled “As We May Think” describing his vision of the future of how we would use machines - called by him Memex - to access a vast set of linked data.
This article inspired Douglas Engelbart. During his stay at Stanford College in Silicon Valley, he formed the Augmentation Research Center and conceived some of the basic inventions for the GUI to be what it is today. Among these inventions was the mouse, a device that allowed moving a pointer across the screen and manipulating information in a more flexible and natural way.
The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.
— Douglas Engelbart
In December 1968 in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart had demonstrated all the new inventions made by his team. Among these inventions was the aforementioned mouse as well as the concept of windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, word processing, version control and a collaborative text editor. This presentation was - and is - a milestone in the history of computing, and became known as The Mother of All Demos, the most fantastic and ahead of its time technical demonstration. It can be - and should be - viewed below.
PARC
The next wave of innovation in the field of Graphical User Interfaces would take place in Palo Alto, at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) lab, where in 1970 much of Engelbart's team went to work. There they refined their ideas and even managed to implement and market these new ideas in 1981 with the Xerox Star computer.
Xerox High The Xerox Star was the first commercial computer to come with a window-based graphical user interface (windows), icons, folders, a mouse, ethernet network, file server, print server, and email.
It was also the first computer to employ the bit mapping technique. In essence, everything on the screen of the Xerox Star was an image. The bit mapping technique simplified the work of graphics and also allowed the computer to display an exact representation of what would be printed on the screen. What became known as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
Many credit the invention of graphical interfaces as we know today from PARC. There, they not only created (refined) the GUI, they also invented object-oriented programming - with the Smalltalk language - the MVC design pattern, laser printer, ethernet, WYSIWYG text editors, and so on.
PARC scientists have defined the basis of the Graphical User Interface as WIMP, for Windows, Icons, Menu and Pointer Device. To date, most desktop systems, including Windows, OS X, Gnome, KDE, use this base.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
– Alan Kay
On top of these basic elements, the Office Metaphor was created. PARC scientists, especially Alan Kay, decided to use metaphors for common office tasks to narrow the learning curve of using a computer.
The metaphor
The first Graphical User Interface, or GUI, was a metaphor for an office environment. The desktop represented an office desk. On top of it were papers, which were computer files.
These same files could be grouped in folders, just as papers are organized in folders in offices. The files could be thrown in a trash just as it is done in an office. These files could even be rescued from the bin, just as we can do with crumpled paper thrown in the trash.
In addition to the office metaphor, the concept of windows was developed. Each window would represent an open application. Each open application would be the equivalent of a paper on a table. In it the work would happen.
Apple was largely responsible for the popularization of the GUI. Steve Jobs on a visit to the Xerox PARC got to know the GUI, and soon realized that this was the future. Xerox was having trouble selling the Xerox Alto, the only computer that had ever run a GUI. Jobs then made a proposal to Xerox to buy the GUI, and implement in what would become the Apple Lisa.
In the video below we have an Apple television advertisement announcing its new computer and its GUI with the office metaphor as a differentiator among other products of the time due to its ease of use. Notice how the actor uses his finger as a pointer, simulating a mouse, pointing to objects that the Mac simulates in its interface, such as papers, folders, and a calculator.
Virtually all operating systems that have adopted a graphical interface have used or use the office metaphor. Some more purist about their own metaphor, others more practical.
BeOS, for example, showed an icon of external devices connected to the desktop, while internal devices were accessed through the computer icon, to be more faithful to metaphor.
One of the most true implementations of metaphor itself came in 2010 with BumpTop. The idea of the BumpTop interface was to more effectively simulate an office desk. In it, documents are small 3D objects that can be stacked, manipulated using gestures and even tossed around using physical laws for a more realistic experience.
Unfortunately, the BumpTop product was discontinued shortly after the company was bought by Google.
Impacts
The Desktop Metaphor developed by Alan Kay's team is still used today in all major desktop operating systems. It was an important step for computers to gain their popularity today. It made possible the use of computers by non-technical people and opened up different possibilities in the creation of computer programs, since we were no longer limited to a command line interface.
It is so popular today that, for many, it has outgrown it's "inspiration." When we talk about folders or files, it comes to mind no longer folders and various papers, but files and folders on a computer. The desktop name itself is more closely related to your computer than it is to the top of your desk.