The Bushy Tree

March 2, 2005 8:28 AM

A clickable genealogy charting the lineage of visual interactive computing systems and user interfaces, by Bruce Damer. Some quirky/broken links, but plenty of interesting stuff there, too.
posted by carter (7 comments total)

Hmmm... I bet Gnome fans are going to be annoyed by his inclusion of KDE and omission of Gnome.
posted by exhilaration at 8:39 AM on March 2, 2005

I'm too young to appreciate most of those technologies, but I ran across some videos of application development on GNUstep a while back. It's not identical to NextStep, but as far as I understand, it's close.

Textual descriptions of NextStep never really made me appreciate how much OS X owes to it. Apple's Interface Builder and all of their software development metaphors are verbatim lifted from NextStep. The connections are so deep that all the API calls in OS X are prefixed by NS. That link is probably stronger even than the System 7 -> OS X link.
posted by heresiarch at 10:13 AM on March 2, 2005

I once read that the design guidelines for NextStep are published and publicly available. Anyone know where those could be found. I tried looking without any luck.
posted by xammerboy at 10:33 AM on March 2, 2005

Hmm. More than half of the computer systems, and huge piles of applications (they include photoshop, after all) aren't on here. I suspect it's a mite incomplete, or perhaps a tad unfocused.
posted by davejay at 1:50 PM on March 2, 2005

Is that a complaint? It's not like there are a ton of other sites, or books, with comprehensive histories of computing interfaces that puts this to shame. This is an interesting project with interesting links. I look forward to seeing it evolve over time.

As well, the inclusion of Photoshop and its ancestry does not suggest to me that there is a lack of focus; it acknowledges that some important developments happen while focusing on the specific, rather than the general. How many other applications have become a verb?

I appreciate being pointed to this.
posted by KS at 2:37 PM on March 2, 2005

Seems to leave BSD out of the OSX equation. I would also say that Photoshop owes as much to MacPaint as anything.
posted by doctor_negative at 3:12 PM on March 2, 2005

Uhh... so it has Atari ST, but no Amiga... and it has Deluxe Paint - one of the early applications that *sold* Amigas... pfeh.
posted by Chunder at 1:38 AM on March 3, 2005