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: To prototype and test various Chicago (Windows 95) interfaces, Microsoft used their Visual Basic 3 tool. Graphical Environment Operating System for Commodore C64 was one of the first, if not the first GUI the author of this website has become fascinated with. GEOS tried to recreate Macintosh interface on a vastly inferior machine, and even if it was slower and more limited, it prolonged the life of a dying 8-bit platform. The help system for Apple II’s GS/OS 5 was so simple – seven windows in total – that we can reproduce it here in its entirety. As GUIs grew more and more complicated, so did the help windows, evolving into huge, slow, Internet-driven monstrosities. Check it out yourself. If you thought first Macintosh icons were small and simple, think again. Icons for Commodore C64 edition of GEOS were also monochromatic, but 24×21 pixels each, almost exactly half the size of Mac’s pictograms.
	Copyright © 2002-2006 Marcin Wichary.