Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

The graphical user interface, for instance, dates back to a famous technology demo given by pioneering computer scientist Doug Engelbart in 1968. During the 1970s, many of its core elements—like the now ubiquitous desktop metaphor—were developed by researchers at Xerox-PARC. But the first commercial product with a fully realized graphical user interface didn’t ship until 1981, in the form of the Xerox Star workstation, followed by the Macintosh in 1984, the first graphical user interface to reach a mainstream, if niche, audience. But it wasn’t until the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990—almost exactly ten years after the Xerox Star hit the market—that graphical user interfaces became the norm.