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A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. In many applications, GUIs are used instead of text-based UIs, which are based on typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.
Mesa is a programming language developed in the mid 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California, United States. The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of the time, because Mesa is a "high level" programming language.
PostScript is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it can be used for many other purposes as well. PostScript was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984. The most recent version, PostScript 3, was released in 1997.
In computing, WYSIWYG, an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, refers to software which allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation. WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the result while the document is being created. In general, WYSIWYG implies the ability to directly manipulate the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.
PARC is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a division of Xerox, tasked with creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems.
Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing.
The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. It is variously considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), a mouse, Ethernet networking, and the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. It is one of the first computers to use a WYSIWYG text editor and has a bit-mapped display. The Alto did not succeed commercially, but it had a significant influence on the development of future computer systems.
The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers, and email.
A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and icons in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned, handling transparent pixels, and various ways of combining the source and destination data.
Cut, copy, and paste are essential commands of modern human–computer interaction and user interface design. They offer an interprocess communication technique for transferring data through a computer's user interface. The cut command removes the selected data from its original position, and the copy command creates a duplicate; in both cases the selected data is kept in temporary storage called the clipboard. Clipboard data is later inserted wherever a paste command is issued. The data remains available to any application supporting the feature, thus allowing easy data transfer between applications.
Dots per inch is a measure of spatial printing, video or image scanner dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm). Similarly, dots per centimetre refers to the number of individual dots that can be placed within a line of 1 centimetre (0.394 in).
Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a character set; at the same time, contrasted to graphics mode or other kinds of computer graphics modes.
Robert William Taylor, known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.
Gypsy was the first document preparation system based on a mouse and graphical user interface to take advantage of those technologies to virtually eliminate modes. Its operation would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer. It was the second WYSIWYG document preparation program, a successor to the Bravo on the Xerox Alto personal computer.
In computing, a shell is a computer program that exposes an operating system's services to a human user or other programs. In general, operating system shells use either a command-line interface (CLI) or graphical user interface (GUI), depending on a computer's role and particular operation. It is named a shell because it is the outermost layer around the operating system.
In user interface design, a mode is a distinct setting within a computer program or any physical machine interface, in which the same user input will produce perceived results different from those that it would in other settings. Modal interface components include the Caps lock and Insert keys on the standard computer keyboard, both of which typically put the user's typing into a different mode after being pressed, then return it to the regular mode after being re-pressed.
Resolution independence is where elements on a computer screen are rendered at sizes independent from the pixel grid, resulting in a graphical user interface that is displayed at a consistent physical size, regardless of the resolution of the screen.
The Retina display is a branded series of IPS LCD and OLED displays by Apple Inc. and have a higher pixel density than its traditional displays. Apple has registered the term "Retina" as a trademark with regard to computers and mobile devices with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and Canadian Intellectual Property Office. The applications were approved in 2012 and 2014 respectively. The Canadian application cited a 2010 application in Jamaica.
References
- 1 2 Borenstein, Nathaniel S. (1991). Programming as if people mattered : friendly programs, software engineering, and other noble delusions (4. print. ed.). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. pp. 132. ISBN 9780691087528.
- ↑ Smith & Alexander 1988, p. 102.
- ↑ "BravoX". IEEE Bushy Tree. Retrieved 2017-05-16.
- Lampson, Butler (1979). "Bravo Manual". Alto User's Handbook. Xerox PARC. pp. 31–62.
