Xerox PARC was the pioneer behind the development of the earliest GUI systems, although they did not manage to capitalize on their own innovations well enough, its fundamentals and philosophies influenced many individuals such as Steve Jobs to really explore its potentials and eventually bring that idea forward in massively successful products like the Macintosh OS. These successes little by little has guided the GUI development to the point that we are familiar of today.
The earliest GUIs that were actually successful relied heavily on the mouse. It was a much more intuitive and frankly a superior experience to typing codes to the system for it to operate, which is why it is considered as an important contributing factor to the success of early GUIs. This is an invention that is already 4 decades old, and it is fascinating to see that the mouse is still an important way of interaction in PCs even after so many years. Modern operating systems did not change the way of interaction very drastically compared to their earlier versions, rather, they usually build on top of existing interaction designs to carefully curate user habits. Touch/Gesture, trackpads, and voice control are all ways of interaction that open new opportunities for human-computer interaction in modern GUIs, combined with more beautiful, elegant designs powered by better hardware, they work together to form a more coherent user experience — something that GUIs 40 years ago couldn’ t possibly do.
