Smooth Operators

Posted at: Tuesday 13th July 2004 by Ben Hardwidge

In the early 1970s a group of scruffy computer bums sank into their beanbags at Xerox PARC and devised an OS with bit-mapped graphics, scrollbars and pop-up menus. Sound familiar? Ben Hardwidge finds out where Windows first started

It's easy to take the GUI (graphical user interface) for granted now. We jiggle our mice, pull down our menus and drag our scrollbars as if it was second nature. But then we're the lucky generation that's had all the hard work done for us. It's difficult to imagine, but only a few years ago our predecessors were feeding punched cards into computers that took up entire rooms. It seems oceans away from the simple land of 'point and click', so whose bright idea was this whole 'windows' thing in the first place?

The obvious answer is Apple, and many ardent Macolytes argue that Windows is a blatant rip-off of Mac OS. Which seems fair enough - with a quick glance at the scrollbars, menus and Recycle Bin, it's easy to see Windows as a shameless bootleg. But, as Bill Gates put it to Steve Jobs in 1983: 'I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.' The truth is that neither company had the creativity or initiative to come up with the original idea, they just had the vision and marketing expertise to nab Xerox PARC's work and make it successful - Apple with its computers, and Microsoft by feeding IBM's PC standard.

Etch a sketch
Before we get onto Xerox, let's go back even further and ask where the GUI started originally. The answer depends on who you talk to, but the GUI is generally considered to have debuted in 1963 at MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Lincoln Laboratory with Ivan Sutherland's 'Sketchpad'. In a manner similar to using a modern-day graphics tablet, Sutherland basically manipulated the lab's TX-2 computer by drawing various graphical shapes on the 7in 1,024 x 1,024 CRT with a 'light pen'.

With the ability to grab the graphics and even zoom in and out, the Sketchpad demonstrated a radically new approach for its time. In 'The Early History of Smalltalk' (gagne.homedns.org/ ~tgagne/contrib/Early HistoryST.html), Alan Kay (who later went on to Xerox PARC and Apple) recalls starting at the University of Utah and being faced with a foot-high stack of documents entitled 'Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system'. Every student was handed one and instructed to 'take this and read it'.

Kay was impressed, but also admitted that 'its data structures were hard to understand'. The Sketchpad was a start, but it was still a long way from the cutesy windows and mouse pointers we know today. The problem was that at this time, computers cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, sprawled out over entire rooms and were generally only understood by a select few boffins. Genuinely personal computers needed to be simple to get your head round and a damn sight smaller too.

Kay realised this early on and, in his 1969 University thesis, came up with the idea for a product he called the 'Dynabook'. It would run on batteries, be the same size as a paper notebook, have a flatscreen display and contain the same amount of power as the vast business computers of the time. Perhaps more importantly, it would also be easy to use, with an OS that anyone could understand and would be later be known as 'Smalltalk'.