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: Desk Accessories in Mac OS (such as Calculator and Stickies) were originally called “desk ornaments.” Since in 1987 RISC OS was still not ready for prime time, and the new Acorn Archimedes machines were about to ship, ArthurOS was written as a temporary replacement. As you can imagine, it was pretty limited, but already introduced several concepts that survived in RISC OS for many years – for example the icon bar at the bottom of the screen (by many considered the inspiration for taskbar in Windows 95) and pop-up menus invoked by pressing the middle mouse button. GUIs weren’t always so forgiving as Windows XP when you typed in an incorrect password. And they haven’t always warned you when you accidentally pressed Caps Lock. Check out how other systems react to password-related mistakes. 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.