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 Seventeen exclusive Apple Lisa posters, free for download: To prototype and test various Chicago (Windows 95) interfaces, Microsoft used their Visual Basic 3 tool. This joint creation of IBM and Microsoft was really crude and at times looked like Windows 2.5 that never was. Soon, Microsoft would leave the alliance, concentrating on Windows, and IBM would rewrite much of the interface for OS/2 2. We’re seeing it happening over and over again. Mac OS 3.0 vs. 8.0, Mac OS X 10.1 vs 10.3 (both pictured), Windows 3.0 vs. 95, Workbench 1.0 vs. 2.0... Each time the GUI starts with white, and then goes metallic. You can usually see the effect throughout the whole interface – looking around at trash cans might be a good start. The icons for clock usually show some fixed hours, such as 3 PM in Windows 3.x and five past five in OS/2 Warp. This icon, from Windows 1.0, is an exception and always shows the current system time.
	Copyright © 2002-2006 Marcin Wichary.