I thought this might be of interest to this audience: "In this sense, user interfaces are cultural artefacts. Furthermore, we believe that when you’re learning how to design an interface, you should study not only the most recent human interface guidelines but also the history and the highlights of user interface design." https://medium.com/@borism/menus-metaphors-and-materials-milestones-of-user-interface-design-f3f75481c46c

thanks for sharing Jack

It would be great if more people had a chance to study the evolution of user interfaces, they would have more appreciation for difficulty of making a good interface, also to see the commercial dead-ends and understand why they failed. Oftentimes it was the interface that became a hindrance, other times it was marketing factors, and superior products died out. The race is not always to the swiftest. Boris mentioned MacPaint, but actually Electronic Art Deluxe Paint which started on the Amiga and then ported to Windows, was the dominant 2D art production tool for a decade; for anything in 256 colors or below it was the only tool people used in the industry. And to ignore Photoshop in the progression of painting is odd. Knoll at ILM had to invent his own tool, because at the time no painting program could handle its own virtual memory to hold the high resolution frames that are involved in erasing wires for Back to the Future hoverboards, etc. The 3D art development products like Rino 3D, Maya, Softimage, 3D Studio Mac, all made contributions. In word processing, one can go back to WordStar, the one started it all, then WordStar 2000, WordPerfect, Lotus Ami, Ventura Publisher, PageMaker, FrameMaker, Quark Xpress, then inDesign and other publishign programs. Each field had its early point, lots of competition, then in maturity one or two companies dominate and all the other attempts are forgotten. The only thing i take exception to in the article is the praise of Kai Krause's interfaces. They were uniformly a pain in the ass to use. He wastes enormous space around his icons, cramping your work area, and the excess size of his controls was ultimately always a bad tradeoff. In Deluxe Paint II for example, the tool palettes were tucked in the corner so that you could have as much editing area as possible. Kai's stuff looked good, and sold for a while until people starting trying to use it and found out it was a terrible interface in reality. Seductive, but excessive, as the user's creation is the primary purpose of a tool, not admiration of the tool itself. It was like a bejeweled wrench. Non-functional decoration and erratic icon size was his trademark. Krause is the Luigi Colani of user interface. Overdone but futuristic looking.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project Deluxe Paint II was my childhood man. I remember Kai's interfaces too. Perhaps the skeuomorphism suggests a feeling of affordance. I see a bunch of tools here. They're all different. They must do a bunch of things.

I also found many surprising elisions in the history, but I'm glad to see someone at least making the attempt to build a record. 🙂