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: The original trash can for Apple Lisa was supposed to have been an old, beat up alley trashcan, with the lid half open, flies buzzing around it and appropriate sounds as user put something inside. This GUI for post-Archimedes Acorn machines featured an updated NewLook interface, but most of the changes (such as support for StrongARM processors, audio and video chips, disk controllers) were under the hood. As all previous editions of RISC OS, it was a ROM release, which meant extremely fast boot times. The help system for Apple II’s GS/OS 5 was so simple – seven windows in total – that we can reproduce it here in its entirety. As GUIs grew more and more complicated, so did the help windows, evolving into huge, slow, Internet-driven monstrosities. Check it out yourself. The Mac OS’s metal trash has come a long way since 1984. It has been modified, shaded, stuffed, made three dimensional, and finally – after a short stint in Rhapsody – replaced by office wire trash in Mac OS X in 2001. Interestingly, trash’s second function to deleting files was... ejecting disks from floppy drive.
	Copyright © 2002-2006 Marcin Wichary.