|  | Welcome to guidebook, a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them.
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| | Site last updated on 6th October 2006:
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| | Three of 14 posters for Macintosh’s 20th birthday present its groundbreaking GUI:
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| | | Contemporary Mac OS X has more in common with NeXTSTEP than with classic Mac OS. When it was obvious that classic Mac OS design has limitation which cannot be overcome, and after several failed internal replacement projects at Apple (including the infamous Copland), the company started looking outside. When it was almost certain that BeOS will serve as a framework for the new OS, Apple surprised everyone by buying out NeXT, Inc., and using their operating system. BeOS was allegedly too limited (it couldn’t even print!) and too expensive. OS/2 and Windows NT were also considered alternatives, as both had PowerPC versions at the time. |
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| |  | 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.
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| |  | Many preference panels for mouse input provide a drawing of an actual mouse, and it is quite interesting to see all the different approaches taken by different GUIs.
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| |  | The Mac OS’s metal trash has come a long way since 1984. It has been modified, shaded, stuffed, made three dimensional, and finally – after a short stint in Rhapsody – replaced by office wire trash in Mac OS X in 2001. Interestingly, trash’s second function to deleting files was... ejecting disks from floppy drive.
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