CS 1 – Triumph of the Nerds, Volume 3 Great Artists Steal
Using pictures instead of words. Graphical User Interface or GUI.
1971
The GUI interface began in Palo Alto at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).
Xerox Alto computer at Xerox PARC had the first GUI, mouse, and Ethernet Local Area
Network.
December 1979
Steve Jobs was shown three things at Xerox PARC:
Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
Network Computer System (Ethernet)
Graphical User Interface (GUI), which he was so blown away by, he didn’t “see” the
other two.
1983
John Sculley was hired by Apple Computers as their CEO.
It was the IBM PC that was overtook the Apple II in the computer market. What drove IBM
sales was software. But software on the IBM would not run on the Mac.
Until the Macintosh, Microsoft was not in the application software business, it was dominated
by Lotus.
1984
January 28th,1984, the Macintosh Computer was introduced by Apple Computers.
By the end of 1984, Mac sales were disastrous. It sold for $2,500, $1,000 more than the IBM
PC. Application software for the Mac was scarce.
1985
Adobe was a company that figured out how to drive laser printers.
The “killer application” for the Mac was desktop publishing.
Late 1980’s
Microsoft developed a GUI that worked with the DOS operating system, called Windows.
Apple Computers sued Microsoft over copying the look and feel of the Macintosh. A case
which Apple lost.
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1990
Microsoft introduced Windows version 3 and sold 30 million copies in a year.
John Sculley said, “The industry wasn’t measured by who had the most innovative
technology, but who had the most open systems adopted by the most other companies.”
1995
Microsoft introduced their first operating system with an integrated GUI, Windows 95.
This series of videos was produced in 1995. Since then many things have happened
including:
 Steve Jobs’ return to Apple Computers and Apple has once again become an
important force in the computer and technology business.
 Apple has switched from the IBM PowerPC CPU to Intel.
 Microsoft’s latest operating system is Vista, a successor to Windows XP.
 IBM is still doing well in the computer business, including processors for games,
laptops, desktop computers, and their enterprise business systems including
mainframes.
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