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To: Charles Hughes who wrote (21783)	11/26/1998 12:19:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Chaz - great post, I especially liked the baby finding its fingers as a metaphor for the 'magic' of the internet experience, it exactly captures what I was trying to say. With your permission (or probably even without it! <g>) I will use that in some of my conversations on this topic. The PS was good too - and your dates are pretty good ball park although the STAR as a project didn't get traction until the mid-70's. But 'a majority of people' combined with the cost of entry to participate in a technology is an important metric in determining when a technical direction gains enough critical mass to become self-sustaining, and therefore to be guaranteed a future. There was an obvious accumulation of technical capability in the late 70's which made GUIs possible - STAR and X being proof points. LISA was interesting but never important as a product except as a precursor to the MAC. You could make a good case for the introduction of the MAC in 1984 as the event which really made the GUI viable, in the same way that the first Mosaic code in 1993 or so made browsers viable. But the systems capable of running GUIs were much more expensive than those which did not, even after the introduction of the MAC. Without the metric of mainstream acceptance of the technical direction, 'popularity' becomes a debate and not a measurable statistic. I would point out that prior to 1990, easily 90% of the data that ran day-to-day corporate america was accessed by character based terminals. The shift to a richer display concept was only slowly gaining ground. And there were certainly a lot of great character-based applications which approximated the GUI feature set. In many ways, those systems were more flexible and certainly were more efficient than what we have today - I used brief as my editor for many years, along with the quarterdeck windowing systems.