Welcome to guidebook, a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them. Site last updated on 6th October 2006: two articles about Xerox: “Xerox xooms toward the office of the future” and “The lab that ran away from Xerox”, and a funny essay about... the cow metaphor Three of 14 posters for Macintosh’s 20th birthday present its groundbreaking GUI: All icons, buttons and GUI elements in Apple Lisa Office System are glyphs in special system fonts, and are drawn internally just like regular text. The first, 1984’s Macintosh interface was black and white, limited, single-tasked and about 200K in size. Yet it showed the world that personal computing could be much friendlier than the command line and set up trends to be followed by nearly all later GUIs. Just one look at desktops from Windows 1.0, Windows 95 and Windows XP simultaneously can tell more about the evolution of GUIs and graphic hardware than hours of studying specifications. You can also check out desktops from other operating systems. The calculator icon changed slightly between Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar and Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, to reflect the latter’s switch to even more metal. Is this the only change? Check for yourself in the big icon chart.
	Copyright © 2002-2006 Marcin Wichary.