ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

History of the GUI

Okay, so you know how you play games and use apps on your tablet or computer, right? Well, a long time ago, people used computers that didn't have anything like that, just a bunch of words and codes on the screen that you had to type in commands for. It was kind of like talking to a robot instead of a friend.

But then, some really smart people thought it would be cool if they could make computers easier to use and more like talking to a friend. So, they came up with something called a Graphical User Interface, or GUI for short.

A GUI is like a special set of pictures, buttons, and icons that you use to tell your computer what to do instead of typing in long and boring commands. This made it much easier for people to use computers, especially people who didn't know how to type or use complicated codes.

The first GUI was created way back in the 1970s by a team of people who worked for a computer company called Xerox. They made a computer system called the Xerox Alto that had a mouse, icons, and windows that you could move around on the screen. This was so revolutionary at the time that it inspired a lot of other people to start working on their own GUIs.

One of those people was a guy named Steve Jobs, who cofounded a company called Apple. He and his team created a GUI for their own computers, which they called the Macintosh. This became really popular in the 1980s and helped make Apple one of the most successful computer companies in the world.

Other companies like Microsoft and IBM also started creating GUIs for their own computers, and pretty soon, almost every computer had one. This made it way easier for people to use computers and helped them become an essential part of everyday life.

So, basically, the history of the GUI is the story of how really smart people figured out how to make computers way easier to use by adding pictures, buttons, and icons so that you didn't have to be a computer expert to use one. And that's why you can enjoy playing games and using fun apps on your computer today!