Interfaces in the 80s: Creating GUIs before it was cool

Recently I was going through some early implementations of current operating systems to familiarize myself with the evolution of GUI mechanics over time. One particular thing that caught my eye was the “InterfaceBuilder.app” from the NeXTStep OS which was created by NeXT in the late 1980s. It was an era where the human-computer interaction was heavily driven by Command-Line interfaces and some earlier iterations of current Windows OSs like Windows 3.0.

Here I managed to deploy a running snapshot of the NeXTStep OS (runs through OpenStep API) on a VirtualBox even though it was based on a (virtual) Floppy. Yes, a floppy!

NeXTStep running on a VirtualBox

It’s magical to see an OS this small and from late ’80s offer you a completely GUI based software design/development application called “InterfaceBuilder” packaged with useful tools like “ProjectBuilder” and “IconBuilder”. The interface itself is very straightforward and easy to understand on the first run as it was intended to cater to the general public even though it only comes with the developer bundle of the NeXTStep. It has its own tiny what we call now a “design system” sort of a thing and it’s easy to arrange those components to form a UI. Also, there’s a pre-defined set of events and functions (which can be customized later on) that corresponds to respective components as well. So there you go, you can design, build and ship a product from your 80’s computer.

But who makes a GUI based software design/development application in an era where even the consumer faced apps were based on CLI?

This was straight-up the man, the myth, the legend Steve Jobs! Jobs founded NeXT after leaving Apple and he admired, prioritized, and practiced the importance of accessible design throughout his life, even before Apple. In an era where designing/developing software was pretty much rocket science, he directed it into a more humane phase while caring about the intuitiveness and the experience. Indeed Jobs was a visionary ahead of his, ours, everyone’s time. We miss you legend!

Today NeXTStep serves as the foundation for the whole Apple eco-system of OSs like macOS, iOS, iPadOS etc. while the “InterfaceBuilder” being the ancestor for his popular grandchild Xcode. So if you want to get into the rabbit hole, be my guest! You’ll find more interesting things that revolutionized HCI such as system-wide findbuffer which is the modern-day Finder/search, invented through NeXTStep researches as an advancement of the generic copybuffer in a time when text-based search was barely a thing. And did you catch the .app extension? Yes, that was the first time a program called an app, before the modern “app store” of course; before… it was cool.

This article was published here in collaboration with uxdesign.cc

Deploy your own NeXTStep image: https://openstep.bfx.re/