Operating System Interface Design From 1981 to 2009

A Graphical User Interface (GUI for short) allows users to interact with the computer hardware in a user friendly way.

Over the years a range of GUI's have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windowsamiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more.

We'll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80's.

Xerox 8010 Star (released in 1981)

Apple Lisa Office System 1 (released in 1983)

VisiCorp Visi On (released in 1984)

Mac OS System 1.0 (released in 1984)

Amiga Workbench 1.0 (released in 1985)

Windows 1.0x (released in 1985)

GEM (released in 1985)

IRIX 3 (released in 1986, first release 1984)

GEOS (released in 1986)

Windows 2.0x (released in 1987)

OS/2 1.x (released in 1988)

NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP 1.0 (released in 1989)

OS/2 1.20 (released in 1989)

Windows 3.0 (released in 1990)

Amiga Workbench 2.04 (released in 1991)

Mac OS System 7 (released in 1991)

Windows 3.1 (released in 1992)

OS/2 2.0 (released in 1992)

Windows 95 (released in 1995)

OS/2 Warp 4 (released in 1996)

Mac OS System 8 (released in 1997)

Windows 98 (released in 1998)

KDE 1.0 (released in 1998)

BeOs 4.5 (released in 1999)

GNOME 1.0 (released in 1999)

Mac OS X (released in 2001)

Windows XP (released in 2001)

KDE 3 (released in 2002)

Windows Vista (released in 2007)

Mac OS X Leopard (released in 2007)

GNOME 2.24 (2008)

KDE (v4.0 Jan. 2008, v4.2 Mar. 2009)

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