What would computing look like now if the GUI was never invented?

[Unknown_K]

What would we all be using these days if the GUI as we know it was never invented (no scalable fonts on screen, multiple windows, drag and drop, etc). Just curious if we never left the DOS era if we would be running DOS apps on current hardware mostly using keyboard commands and function keys to navigate multiple programs running in full screen mode. Would we all be using dumb terminals connected to text ASCHI spitting mainframes?

 

[barythrin]

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│ I'd guess we'd just be doing ASCII/ANSI menus still? ║▓
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With ... well I can't remember now but either windows 95/98 or 3.x I toyed with making it a dos multitasking OS by replacing progman or something else in 9x with command.com so I had just a CLI and the ability to tab between them. But I'd just assume we'd have command windows and full screen applications with the ability to alt+tab and I'd be pretty happy.

edit:interestingly VB borks up my menu.. thought the code thing would get around that.

 

[k2x4b524[]

naaaaaa, if the GUI didn't exist, i think dos would either have died out to unix or evolved into the powershell far sooner than it had. CP/M would still be around and floppy disks would still be main stream. Remember the main reason we need all the power is for servers and graphics anyway. Dump the graphics your left with servers, and dos or some command line shell.

 

[krebizfan]

Eventually a GUI was going to take hold. Non-graphical text editors often gained multiple windows so you could move text from one section to another and see both. Drag and drop would have followed at some point once mice took hold though exact mechanics might have been different than what we do now. The influx of more artistically inclined people (inevitable as the number of computers increase) led to purchasers shifting to the more WYSIWYG applications. If legislation prohibited computers from shipping with a standard GUI that was open to development, the net result would have resembled the late-80s DOS applications with every company having their own exclusive GUI. Eventually, the designs would have converged as good ideas win out.

Net result: Either one application provider would dominate and become the defacto GUI or everyone would need much bigger hard disks to handle multiple GUIs.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Light pens predate the mouse by quite a long time, so who needs a mouse? Even touchscreens (primitive) predate mice.

Multi-aperture text and split screens predate windows. Given the quality of some of the icons, I'm not sure if they're any use anyway. And graphical displays are very, very old.

On the other hand, on low-end systems, we might be using more natural language interfaces--and perhaps improving literacy. If I go to the local market, I don't have to draw a picture of a head of cabbage to get one, after all. And humans communicate verbally, by and large, not with pictures.

 

[SpidersWeb]

What would we all be using these days if the GUI as we know it was never invented (no scalable fonts on screen, multiple windows, drag and drop, etc). Just curious if we never left the DOS era if we would be running DOS apps on current hardware mostly using keyboard commands and function keys to navigate multiple programs running in full screen mode. Would we all be using dumb terminals connected to text ASCHI spitting mainframes?

Data entry / typists / basic users running off dumb terminals, and professionals who need the performance get their own workstations.
Same as it was! Even with GUIs, this is still done - Citrix etc Terminals are still being used today - just they're SVGA now and not completely dumb

One thing I realized recently, that I don't remember seeing utilized, and that was 132 column mode - most VGA cards (even my WD 1988 cards) supported it and the extra real estate is very nice!

 

[commodorejohn]

Light pens predate the mouse by quite a long time, so who needs a mouse? Even touchscreens (primitive) predate mice.

Some form of separate proportional-movement pointer control would've developed eventually. Light-pens and touchscreens aren't suitable for involved use because A. they require that you either hold your hand up in front of your face to touch a screen placed for viewing, or hunch over to view a screen placed for handling, and B. a human hand and stylus blocks out a lot more screen space than a mouse pointer. A joystick might've done for the purpose, but I suspect the mouse was the logical development for the purpose.

On the other hand, on low-end systems, we might be using more natural language interfaces--and perhaps improving literacy. If I go to the local market, I don't have to draw a picture of a head of cabbage to get one, after all. And humans communicate verbally, by and large, not with pictures.

Natural-language controls require more effort to achieve the same tasks. Humans communicate with other humans verbally, but verbal communication is not the most efficient way to do pretty much anything else besides communicating with other humans - ever tried to instruct someone on how to assemble a puzzle without using your hands?

 

[MikeS]

What would we all be using these days if the GUI as we know it was never invented (no scalable fonts on screen, multiple windows, drag and drop, etc). Just curious if we never left the DOS era if we would be running DOS apps on current hardware mostly using keyboard commands and function keys to navigate multiple programs running in full screen mode. Would we all be using dumb terminals connected to text ASCHI spitting mainframes?

Apples and oranges. You don't need a GUI to have multiple windows or scalable fonts etc. and as Chuck says graphic displays and printers, plotters, alternate input devices etc. were all around long before the mouse and the GUI, and I don't see the connection between GUIs and local vs. on line processing at all.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Some form of separate proportional-movement pointer control would've developed eventually. Light-pens and touchscreens aren't suitable for involved use because A. they require that you either hold your hand up in front of your face to touch a screen placed for viewing, or hunch over to view a screen placed for handling, and B. a human hand and stylus blocks out a lot more screen space than a mouse pointer. A joystick might've done for the purpose, but I suspect the mouse was the logical development for the purpose.

If I read you correctly, you despise pencils and paper because after all, you have to hunch over it and your hand obscures what the pencil is doing. One thing that a mouse won't get you is immediacy. You're wiggling something at the end of your arm placed some distance away from the thing it's actually manipulating. This is good? Using arm movements for fine detail work, rather than finger movements? Sounds like a recipe for RSD to me.

Look at some of the 1960's CAD systems (Digigraphics would be a good one). A large CRT placed at about a 10 degree angle from horizontal with a fiber-optic light pen used to pick, drag or select. In 50 years, I suspect we might succeed in making the pen wireless. In other words, a direct evolution from paper and pencil. Draw something with a pen and see it materialize under the pen tip as you write. Amazing!

RSD from mice is still very much with us. A mouse is a very imperfect pointing device.

Natural-language controls require more effort to achieve the same tasks. Humans communicate with other humans verbally, but verbal communication is not the most efficient way to do pretty much anything else besides communicating with other humans.

So what's life about, then? One could make the claim that our current technological system makes communicating with machines has become more important than communicating with other humans. Judging from the political noise that we're bombarded with, I suspect that's the case today.

You tell him, Siri!

 

[MikeS]

If I read you correctly, you despise pencils and paper because after all, you have to hunch over it and your hand obscures what the pencil is doing. One thing that a mouse won't get you is immediacy. You're wiggling something at the end of your arm placed some distance away from the thing it's actually manipulating. This is good? Using arm movements for fine detail work, rather than finger movements? Sounds like a recipe for RSD to me.

Amen to that! I use a Toshiba M400 Portege laptop/tablet convertible originally running Tablet XP and now Win7 and much prefer the stylus over the touchpad or a mouse; once our fingertips evolve into pointy ends we'll have the same precision on our tablets of the future...
https://www.google.ca/search?q=tosh...=MDczU6-TF9G_qQHmz4D4CQ&sqi=2&ved=0CD8Q9QEwAw

 

[SpidersWeb]

I prefer the mouse, because with high sensitivity and resolution I can accurately position the cursor with very minimal movement.
But mice aren't practical for portable devices, so touch is certainly the best option there.

What would really need to change to make touch more common in the work environment, requires a change in furniture. You need the screen in a position where it's comfortable to touch, much like a piece of paper would be. I always find it odd watching my boss with his touch Windows 8 laptop lifting his entire arm just to click something.


Edit: whoops just realised how off topic this was

 

[luvit]

GUI is so inevitable it's a tough theory to share. -- Compare graphical adventures and how they progressed prior to requiring Windows. (e.g. King's Quest VII for DOS).
So to the point of the OP, i can only envision Desqview, or a version of DosShell that would support multiple virtual terminals like Linux terminals (Alt-Fx).
But considering the advancement of how graphical DOS games appeared, I would foresee GUI menu systems designed per application.. fragmented ideas between each software company. They would be reinventing the wheel and copyrighting their work so no other company can easily mimick their successful menu style.

A standard GUI or not, once any potential multitasking would be overcome in a mainstream OS like DOS, the menu systems would be pretty frustrating to switch between.
This is where I would see Linux potentially be embraced by software companies if the other competing mainstream OS was still MS-DOS.

 

[SomeGuy]

"What would we all be using these days if the GUI as we know it was never invented"

That is a very general question. GUIs as we know it are a combination of:

Appropriate input devices
Bit-mapped displays
Computing power to multi-task
Common user interface guidelines
Application integration or communication
A graphical paradigm or metaphor (desktop, raw windows, bunch of beginner buttons or tiles, etc)

The lack of some of these could still give us software similar to what we are familiar with.

For example, if we were stuck with character cell displays, but had sufficient computing power you could easily have a text-based windowing systems. Applications could still have standard interface elements, multi task, share data, and even point-and-click with a mouse.

That reminds me, some video cards like my Video 7 card actually supported a graphical mouse cursor in text modes. (essentially using an arrow shaped "sprite" floating over the text)

On the other hand, if you still had bit mapped displays, but take away appropriate input devices, common user interface guidelines, application integration, and the common desktop metaphor then you are left with.... Windows 8

 

[commodorejohn]

If I read you correctly, you despise pencils and paper because after all, you have to hunch over it and your hand obscures what the pencil is doing. One thing that a mouse won't get you is immediacy. You're wiggling something at the end of your arm placed some distance away from the thing it's actually manipulating. This is good? Using arm movements for fine detail work, rather than finger movements? Sounds like a recipe for RSD to me.

Paper and pencil (or display-and-stylus) is good for drawing because the user's action is directly analogous to the desired result; thus, it preserves that immediacy you mention (in fact, I've pretty much entirely gone back to traditional media for my drawing for exactly this reason.) Nevertheless, yes, it does have the downside of an arm and hand obscuring a good bit of the work area; it's just still a worthwhile tradeoff. But it's not remotely the most efficient or intuitive method for anything else. Control of arbitrary computer tasks in a graphical environment requires a certain degree of precision if one wants to make any kind of efficient use of screen space; a mouse is better-suited for this because it allows intuitive movement of a cursor without requiring that the cursor controller be situated in the same space as the display, so it can be placed in a more comfortable resting position, and because it allows fine precision with less movement.

And if you require full arm movements for precision positioning, you really should adjust your mouse sensitivity and work on getting the hang of moving it with the wrist and fingers.

So what's life about, then? One could make the claim that our current technological system makes communicating with machines has become more important than communicating with other humans. Judging from the political noise that we're bombarded with, I suspect that's the case today.

The point is that communicating with machines is much more easily accomplished through means other than speech or natural-language text entry. Machines are dumb - even when they're pretending not to be dumb, they're dumb - and although they perform much more complex tasks than they used to, they still don't do anything complex or nuanced enough that being able to control them with natural language would represent a significant improvement on much faster and easier simple controls. Until we reach the point where we have machines intelligent enough that, say, asking a computer to identify thematic similarities between the works of Marcel Proust and his contemporaries in other continental European nations could yield a meaningful result, I don't see that changing.

 

[vwestlife]

The GUI and mouse were invented in the 1960s, so you have to go a long way back to change the history on that.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

 

[k2x4b524[]

You have one of those too? Sweet. The stylus with the 1440x1050 screen is a godsend, you can do everything with just that stylus. Mine has Windows 8.1 with 4gb ram. When I DO use it, it's stylus all the way. I could see how that can be that can be ported to dos or what have you. Didn't Compaq venture into this back into the 386 days with penabled dos abnd win 3.11? I think the world would be a very different place had the stylus and handwriting took over instead of the mouse. I view the lightpen as an evolution to the stylus, despite being out before, which leads me to ask a question. Could the light pen work on an LCD or plasma screen? I think the evolution if GUI hadn't taken hold would have allowed this, we may even have developed the advanced touchscreens we have now, but back in the 90's or maybe even earlier.

Amen to that! I use a Toshiba M400 Portege laptop/tablet convertible originally running Tablet XP and now Win7 and much prefer the stylus over the touchpad or a mouse; once our fingertips evolve into pointy ends we'll have the same precision on our tablets of the future...
https://www.google.ca/search?q=tosh...=MDczU6-TF9G_qQHmz4D4CQ&sqi=2&ved=0CD8Q9QEwAw

 

[Chuck(G)]

The trackball goes back to 1946, so what is a mouse, other than a shrunken trackball turned upside-down?

I haven't checked, but I believe the earliest uses for a CRT on a computer were for graphic, not text display, however crude.

My first experience with a mouse was schematic design on a PC XT back around 1985 (Schema SDT). After getting severe pain trying to do fine-resolution graphic placement and drawing, I eventually learned to use my left hand, something that I stick with today. Trackballs (and footdisks) are fine for gross stuff, but give me a really good light pen any day.

My vision of the perfect setup is a display that comprises the entire top of my desk with a wireless stylus to draw things.

 

[MikeS]

Like most aspects of this field (and many others) the 'best' way very much depends on what you're doing and under what circumstances:

- For typing documents, working with spreadsheets etc. I prefer a normal keyboard/laptop and mouse, using shortcuts as much as possible.
- For drawing, browsing, etc., stuff that's mostly mouse (or touch) driven, I use tablet mode and the stylus, especially if I'm away from a desk.
- For entering or checking lists of numbers etc. while looking at or handling something else I often find speech input handy.
- And for browsing, reading, playing etc. while lying on the couch I plug it into the TV's VGA input and use a wireless keyboard/track ball combo.

Works for me.

 

[Al Kossow]

My vision of the perfect setup is a display that comprises the entire top of my desk with a wireless stylus to draw things.

The Wacom Cintiq looks pretty cool (and expensive)

 

[MikeS]

The Wacom Cintiq looks pretty cool (and expensive)

A used Portege would be a lot cheaper and also uses Wacom technology; it is of course a little smaller, but my desk usually doesn't have much more visible area anyway... ;-)