[andrehacker]

Well, yes and no. For many people in our profession, anything related to computers is thought to have started in the late 70s when computers became things that worked outside of elaborate data centers. It is somewhat amusing that the collective memory now is that the mouse and GUI were invented by Xerox, virtualization is thought to be a thing from the late 90s, and touch screens are from the 2000s, even though all that technology was around since the 60s. We must have driven the old-timers nuts with all the widespread mainstream bragging about our “inventions”.

[kragen]

Yeah, I always struggle with how to describe what Xerox invented GUIwise. Sutherland's SKETCHPAD in 01963 had an interactive CAD graphical user interface with windows, icons, and a pointer—but no menus, overlapping windows, or desktop, and not much text (it slowed the display list redraw down a lot). NLS had white backgrounds, hypertext, and a mouse, but still no command menus or WYSIWYG editing or overlapping windows. You issued textual commands to make edits to the displayed text. What I'm using now to write this is recognizably "the same thing" as Smalltalk-76 in a way that Smalltalk-76 wasn't the same thing as Smalltalk-72 or NLS or Sketchpad.

So, "the desktop GUI"? But Smalltalk-80 didn't have a desktop in the sense of a place to represent your files with icons, even if Star did. WYSIWYG? Direct manipulation? But Shneiderman's #1 example of "direct manipulation" is Emacs.

But it's also recognizably "the same" as medieval manuscripts in many ways!