I did a fast search in google and found the following time line, which I think might be of interest to you:
An Unofficial History of Graphical User Interfaces
The following is an entirely unofficial list of claimed historical origins for many of the various human interface concepts that make up the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for various mainframe and personal computers, notably the Macintosh computer. It is adapted from a sequence of Usenet newsgroup messages posted by Oliver Steele (steele@weiss.cs.unc.edu) in March 1988 (I've never checked to see if these messages can still be found in DejaVue).
Please note that I have no special knowledge on these issues myself; I simply collected most of the following information from the 1988 newsgroup discussions. I have posted it here simply because the subject seems to come up so often in newsgroup discussions, especially on alt.folklore.computers.
If readers want to send brief comments or additions on the following to (siegman@ee.stanford.edu), I'll try to add them to this file as time permits; but I take no responsiblity for the accuracy of anything stated below.
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Notes and Comments
1) In the following SRI refers to the Stanford Research Institute, which was its original name. Stanford Research Institute was originally established by Stanford University to do proprietary and commercially oriented research that might not have been appropriate in the University's own research labs. During the campus disruptions of the Vietnam-Cambodia era (1969-70) the Institute bought itself free from Stanford and was renamed SRI International. It has become famous in interface history for the pioneering early work on the mouse and other concepts by Douglas Engelbart in the mid 1970s.
2) Xeroc PARC refers the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the "dream lab" in the foothills behind Stanford. It's contribution to computer interface ideas is described in the book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander. PARC developed the Star and the Alto, though few were apparently ever sold commercially. The tour of this lab that Xerox voluntarily offered to Steve Jobs in 1979 introduced Jobs to many of the interface ideas that were later used or modified into the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh in 1983 and 1984. Claims that these ideas were "stolen" by Jobs for the Macintosh do not seem accurate; Xerox received substantial compensation in the form of stock from Apple.
3) An excellent reference on the details and design principles of the Mac GUI is the Apple publication Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface (Addison-Wesley, 1987). An interesting observation is that in this text the terms Apple, Lisa, Macintosh, MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw are always marked as registered or trademarked terms. The terms Finder and especially Apple Desktop Interface, however, though always capitalized, are not shown as registered or trademarked terms.
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Histories of Individual Graphic User Interface Elements:
Keyboard-based menus
Earlier than 1978, probably quite ancient
Keyboard-based hierarchical menus
UCSD's Pascal system (1978) or earlier
Bitmapped displays
CSL@Xerox PARC, for the Alto(?). PERQ was first commercial product (or Terak Corporation, c. 1978)
BitBLT raster operations
Dan Ingalls(LRG)@Xerox PARC
Light guns
SAGE air defense system and its predecessor, the Cape Cod System at MIT, in 1955 or so
Light pen as screen pointer
1960 or earlier
Joysticks
Analog air traffic control displays in the late 50s, e.g., the RBDE-5 (Radar Bright Display Equipment) made by Raytheon. Also spacewar games, 1962 or earlier.
Trackballs
Digital air traffic control displays, mid 1960s.
Pointing device with on-screen pointer
Doug Englebart@SRI (mid 70s).
Mouse
Doug Englebart@SRI (trackball upside down?)
Cursor changes to show system mode
William Newman@Xerox PARC
Cursor changes to show context
David Tilbrook (Newswhole) (1975)
Menus
LRG@Xerox PARC (?)
Popup Menus
Ingalls(LRG)@Xerox PARC
Pulldown menus
Lisa@Apple
Menu bar
Lisa@Apple
Hierarchical menus
Paeth(SSL)@Xerox PARC (Smalltalk)
Disabling of menu items
Lisa@Apple or Ed Anson (1980 or earlier) or Xerox PARC (1982 or earlier)
Command keys for menu items
Lisa@Apple or Ed Anson (1980) or earlier
Check marks on menu items
Lisa@Apple
Overlapped windows
Ingalls(LRG)@Xerox PARC
Tiled windows
CSL@Xerox PARC
Event queues
Simula@NCC, then Lisa@Apple or Ed Anson(GPGS) - > CORE, GKS (1975)
Icons
David Smith(SDD)@Xerox (Star->Mac->Lisa)
Scroll bars
LRG@Xerox PARC
Push Buttons
LRG@Xerox PARC
Radio Buttons
Kaehler(LRG)@Xerox PARC
Check Boxes
LRG@Xerox PARC (?)
Dimming of inactive buttons
David Tilbrook (Newswhole) (1975)
Dialog Boxes
Star@Xerox PARC (property sheets)
Concept of resources
Horn(Mac)@Apple
Multiple fonts & styles in text
CSL@Xerox PARC (Bravo) or Wang word processors (1978 or earlier)
Modeless Interaction
Tesler(SSL)@Xerox PARC
Move/Copy/Delete
Xerox PARC
Cut/Copy/Paste with a mouse
Tesler(SSL)@Xerox PARC (Gypsy, Smalltalk)
Selection point between characters
Tesler(SSL)@Xerox PARC (Gypsy & Smalltalk). TECO had this earlier than PARC, it is claimed; also Stanford's TVEDIT running on DEC timesharing systems, Brian Tolliver, 1963
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Bruce Horn also noted that:
I think it is unrealistic to attribute many of these concepts to a single person. Many folks in LRG (Learning Research Group) & SSL (Systems Science Laboratory), CSL (Computer Science Laboratory), and SDD (Systems Development Division) at Xerox PARC, and the Lisa and Mac groups at Apple were involved in creating these ideas.
Ed Anson pointed out that menus have been around longer than pointing devices, i.e., the first menus were keyboard-based menus. In the list above "Menu" without modifier means a mouse-driven one. Josh Littlefield, Peter Schachte, and Jack Campin pointed out that some systems allow the user to copy/move text in ways other than cut/copy/paste.
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