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 Check out exclusive posters commemorating various obsolete GUI elements and applications: There were several computers having a complete GUI in their Read-Only Memory, ready to be used instantly after powering on. The list includes 1990’s Macintosh Classic (with built-in System 6.0.3), Atari ST (excluding very early editions of 520ST with TOS on a floppy disk) and Acorn machines with RISC OS. Admit it, you probably never used nor seen one. The first, 1985’s version of freshly-renamed Interface Manager was ugly, non-functional (didn’t even have overlapping windows!) and never gained much market share. It took Windows another five years to become widely recognized. This is how four different operating systems (BeOS R5, Mac OS 8.0, OS/2 Warp 4 and Solaris 9) look while launching. Check out how other GUIs say “coming right up!” 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.
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