In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh with the first easy to use windowed graphical user interface for a home computer. They obviously had a massive effect on the rest of the PC industry since you cannot find an operating system today without a windowed graphical user interface (GUI) of some form. Even UNIX operating systems including Linux, BSD, and Solaris come with GUIs (like X) that hide or improve upon much of the underlying text interface. While Apple did not invent the concept or design the very first GUI, that credit is usually given to researchers at XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Apple's was the first commercially successful one and has since been copied widely to various degrees.

Looking at Apple's upcoming operating system, Mac OS X, we see a major human interface improvement coming, oddly enough, in the field of aesthetics.

A new interface, called Aqua, provides a massive aesthetic boost to Mac OS X. Aqua is built upon the old Mac OS interface, but makes widespread use of transparencies, anti-aliasing, color blends, 3D interfaces, high-resolution icons, special effects and video integration in an attempt to just plain look good. Whether it looks good or bad to you is, of course, a matter of personal taste.

On the PC side, graphical interfaces have looked better and better with every generation of the Windows operating system. Take a look at 16-bit Windows and you might be shocked by just how ugly it is compared to Windows 2000. Microsoft has certainly taken pointers from the Mac OS in the past, and we expect them to do so in the future as well.

Windows 2000 arguably looks better than Windows 98 SE, and we expect the trend to continue in future Microsoft as well as other companies' operating systems. We expect Microsoft will slowly evolve their Windows interface to use similar features to Aqua, using at least higher resolution icons and more widespread anti-aliasing. Of course, other than the odd X skin, we do not expect anyone to copy Aqua too closely.