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 New set of posters with mouse pointers: To prototype and test various Chicago (Windows 95) interfaces, Microsoft used their Visual Basic 3 tool. Admit it, you probably never used nor seen one. The first, 1985’s version of freshly-renamed Interface Manager was ugly, non-functional (didn’t even have overlapping windows!) and never gained much market share. It took Windows another five years to become widely recognized. This is how four different operating systems (BeOS R5, Mac OS 8.0, OS/2 Warp 4 and Solaris 9) look while launching. Check out how other GUIs say “coming right up!” Acrobat Reader 1.0 had a nice, simple, red/black/white splash screen. Ten years later Adobe Reader 6.0 revisited and, in some ways, reversed that design idea. Four versions in the middle, however, tried to entertain us with colourful drawings. Find out which approach you prefer more.
	Copyright © 2002-2006 Marcin Wichary.