M. KOZYBAYEV

NORTH KAZAKHSTAN

STATE UNIVERSITY

Essay on topic

Perspectives of development of Interfaces

Prepared by student :Erzhankyzy S

Faculty:NASF

Group:B(o)-16k

The supervisor:Kalinichenko S.A

Petropavlovsk

2017

Introduction

One of the most impressive phenomena in programming over the past twenty years has been the triumph of the interface, consisting of windows, icons, menus and pointers (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers - WIMP). Today it is very widely known and does not require description. For the first time this idea was presented to the public by Douglas Englebart with a group of colleagues from the Stanford Research Institute at the Joint Computer Conference of the West in 1968. From there, the ideas migrated to the Xerox research center in Palo Alto, where they were implemented on a personal workstation Alto, designed by Bob Taylor (Bob Taylor) and co-workers. They were picked up by Steve Jobs for the Apple Lisa computer - too slow to implement their delightful concepts of ease of use. These concepts, Jobs then embodied in the commercially successful Apple Macintosh in 1985. Later they were adopted in Microsoft Windows for IBM PC and its clones.

History

The whole history of the development of interfaces is best characterized by the concept introduced by the renowned expert in the field of evolutionary biology, Jay Gould - "punctuated equilibrium", when long periods of stability are interrupted by rapid changes. We can identify four qualitatively different generations, which are characterized by four interface styles; representatives of the first three generations reigned not for one year. Now on the agenda - the interfaces of the new, fourth generation. In the first period (50's and early 60's) computers, as is known, worked mostly in batch mode, using punch cards for input and a line printer for output; it could be argued that there was virtually no point in talking about the user interface - there was no concept of an "interactive user" in the modern sense of the word (although some of us managed to debug right from the console using switches and light indicators as a "user interface" ). In the second period, the evolution of interfaces (from the early 60's to the beginning of the 80's) was dominated by the time-sharing mode on mainframes and mini-computers using mechanical or "glass" teletypes (alphanumeric displays), when users could interact with computer by entering commands from the keyboard with parameters. Note that this type of interaction also captured the PC age with MS DOS and Unix OS. The third generation of user interfaces took the start back in the 70's - in the mode of time-sharing and manual input of commands. At the Xerox PARC research center, graphical user interfaces (GUI) were created, designed for work on raster graphic network workstations. These interfaces are usually referred to as WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointing device), which reflects the interactive entities involved - windows, icons, menus and positioning devices (usually a mouse). It is the interfaces of this type, which gained popularity with the Macintosh in 1984 and later copied, in particular, in Windows for PCs, are still dominant. Note that today's applications have interfaces of the same type as the early "desktop" applications, except that the degree of "realism" has increased due to the use of modern interface "widgets" - tools that allow, for example, to use shadows for screen buttons. Perhaps, new quality in comparison with the interfaces of the previous generation was the active use of color and availability for a wide range of developers of a representative set of software tools for building WIMP-interfaces. It's amazing that the third generation WIMP GUI has been dominating for so long. Apparently, the interfaces of this type fully meet the requirements of a significant part of modern desktop applications.