Today in Technology History
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May 24
Think about how you control the computer in front of you. You almost certainly have a "graphical user interface" (sometimes abbreviated GUI, pronounced "gooey"). That means that, in addition to your keyboard, you have some other way of interacting with the computer and moving things around on the screen. Most likely, you have a mouse -- but you may instead have a trackball or trackpoint, a touch-screen or touch-pad, a pen, a pointer, a joystick, or something similar.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of a graphical user interface was at the center of a series of major lawsuits. The first lawsuit came from the Apple computer company, which sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for copying the "look and feel" of Apple's Macintosh operating system. Apple claimed that the other companies had violated Apple's copyright by illegally imitating the colors, the icons, the windows and other features of the Macintosh interface. Billions of dollars were at stake.
Then Apple got a slap in the face: another company, Xerox, publicly claimed that it was the true originator of the graphical user interface. Apparently, Apple's computer scientists -- including Steve Jobs, a founder of Apple -- were inspired to design their user-friendly interface after a 1979 visit to a Xerox research center, where they witnessed the GUI that Xerox was developing. So on May 24, 1989, Xerox announced that it would demand fees from other companies -- including Apple -- that sold products with GUIs. A lawsuit against Apple followed.
By 1992, the lawsuits had dissipated. Apple and Xerox both failed to take control of the entire graphic interface industry, and most computer users around the world ended up with some version of Microsoft's Windows operating system.
By the way, graphic user interfaces for computers didn't actually originate with Xerox, either. Douglas Engelbart (born 1925) probably deserves most of the credit; he invented the computer mouse in the 1960s, and some of Xerox's computer scientists had worked with him.
Related links:
Click here to read about the history of graphic user interfaces.
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