Comments on: The Bushy Tree

The Bushy Tree

carter — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:28:40 -0800

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.

By: exhilaration

exhilaration — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:39:18 -0800

Hmmm... I bet Gnome fans are going to be annoyed by his inclusion of KDE and omission of Gnome.

By: heresiarch

heresiarch — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:13:08 -0800

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.

By: xammerboy

xammerboy — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:33:07 -0800

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.

By: davejay

davejay — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:50:24 -0800

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.

By: KS

KS — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 14:37:40 -0800

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.

By: doctor_negative

doctor_negative — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:12:14 -0800

Seems to leave BSD out of the OSX equation. I would also say that Photoshop owes as much to MacPaint as anything.

By: Chunder

Chunder — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 01:38:10 -0800

Uhh... so it has Atari ST, but no Amiga... and it has Deluxe Paint - one of the early applications that *sold* Amigas... pfeh.