Development of interfaces
The father of interfaces can be considered Douglas Englebart. In 1968, at the joint computer conference of the West, he implemented his ideas related to interfaces.
Display
Mouse and keyboard
Douglas holds the first mouse
Further, in 1979, the company Xerox offered the public computer Alto. Its most striking feature was the display, the same size and orientation as the printed document. The display was raster, with raster graphics and an extension of 606x808. Each pixel could be turned on / off independently of each other. Alto also had a keyboard and a modernized mouse of Englebart. The mouse cursor itself was a picture in the form of an oblique arrow, which we know today. The form also changed, depending on the actions performed.
Alto was not a microcomputer per se, although its elements were housed in a case that could easily be placed under the table:
Smalltalk and Lisa
One of the biggest breakthroughs in the user interface was the appearance of the GUI Smalltalk (Xerox) and Lisa (Apple).
Separate windows in Smalltalk'e were edged with a graphic border and stood out against a gray background. Each of the windows had a header at the top, which allowed to identify the window and move it around the screen. The window title did not stretch over the entire length of the window, but only limited to its own length, beginning in the upper left corner. The windows could overlap each other, and the selected window moved to the foreground to the user. At the same time, the concept of "icons" was realized - a small symbolic representation of a program or document that could be clicked to launch or manipulate it. Here there are drop-down menus - the user clicks one of the mouse buttons and a hierarchical graphical menu appears, the contents of which depend on the operations performed. For the first time there are scrollbars (scrollbars), radio buttons and dialog boxes.
Many different Lisa interface prototypes were created, including a task-based interface called "Twenty Questions". The Lisa development team settled on an interface based on icons: each icon symbolized a document or application. Here, for the first time, a drop-down menu was developed where all the menus were at the very top of the screen. Other innovations that came from the Lisa team included checkboxes in front of the selected menu items, keyboard shortcuts for the most frequently used commands. In Lisa, some PARC agreements have been changed and new ones have been added, for example, the idea of a dumpster for documents to be deleted, the idea of shading inaccessible menu items. The three-button mouse, which lost one button in Star, lost another button at Lisa, becoming one-button. And since the interface required at least two actions for each icon (selection and launch), the idea of a double click appears. Later, "double-click" will be a standard tool for launching programs in all GUIs, even those that are lucky enough to have several mouse buttons. Lisa's user interface will bring other concepts that are used to this day. In SmallTalk icons represented some files, Lisa also offers: icons can represent all the files in the file system, which can then be viewed using a hierarchical directory structure, where each directory opens in a new window. At the same time, there is the idea of drag-n-drop, and from here naturally follows the idea of dragging files to manipulate them (for example, selecting a group of files and dragging to another location may represent copying files). Less tangible, but still significant, was the idea of "resource forks", which attached information about the file separately from the file itself, and the idea of "creator classes", meaning that with each file an application can be associated that starts by double clicking on the file.