History of UNIX User Interfaces – 1969 to 1998

I recently came across a phenomenal graphical history of UNIX user interfaces done by user “Spice Weasel” over at ubuntuforums.org, and I thought I would share it.

It includes screenshots of what the UNIX desktop looked like from the dawn of our modern operating systems in the late 60s to the turn of the millennium.

Sneak Preview:

(Image Credit: screenshot from ubuntuforums.org)

Click here to see this wonderful piece in its entirety. Click here for the full discussion that includes it.

You will note that most of these old UNIX screenshots look much nicer than what you would find on a typical home computer of that same year. The most stunning case in point is the 1993 CDE, pictured above, as compared with the contemporary Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 that was still a few years in the future. Part of that is because these were intended for expensive and mission-critical big business uses, not for writing a letters to grandma.

The screenshots are of the following:

• Unix in 1969. All of us Linux and Mac users are still using principles and methods that date from this period in time.
• The great leap forward of twm in 1987. twm relied on the X Window System, from 1984. Many of us Linux and Mac users are still using X’s child, X11, on a daily basis.
• 1989’s OpenWindows from Sun Microsystems.
• CDE – Common Desktop Environment – in 1993.
• FVWM-95 in 1995, a Red Hat implementation.
• KDE in 1998.

To complete the history and fill in the last decade of UNIX user interfaces for a total of 42 years, this was me playing around with my desktop as of a few hours ago in the context of a hyper-nerdy discussion. If I weren’t lazier, there would have been a fancy icon and more imaginative text in the upper left corner.

(Click for full size)