It is hard to say exactly when the WIMP paradigm came into being. The mouse and pointer (or ‘bug’ as it was originally called) came out of the work of Douglas Engelbart and his research staff at the Stanford Research Institute during the mid to late 1960s (his Mother of all Demonstrations is still amazing to watch). It was later, with Xerox Parc’s Alto and Xerox Star, and with the Apple Lisa, that the WIMP approach solidified. Which device got there first is somewhat irrelevant; between them, these early devices established the central features of what we now know as desktop environments.
The ‘WIMP’ paradigm is made up of four key components: windows, icons, menus and a pointer. The approach was highly file-centric when it was conceived, and mimicked the physical world of the office. There were files and file systems, and a desktop containing a variety of objects, such as a wastebasket. (The Xerox Star desktop even had an inbox and outbox for mail.) Multiple files could be worked with simultaneously by having them on the screen at the same time, with windows forming the basis of early multitasking functionality.
Continue reading Welcome to the Post-WIMP Era
