Interacting with computers has evolved a lot over the years. Many of us can recall the use of paper tape and punch cards to interact with and program computers. These led the way in the 1970s to teletypes and visual display units (VDUs). These paper interfaces were the technologies used by mainframe computer operators for years before VDUs became the way of interacting with mainframes and, eventually, personal computers.
Once the VDU came into place, command-line interaction became much more commonplace. Although the command line is still in use today for many tasks, one of the features that, arguably allowed personal computers to make quick inroads into offices and homes was the graphical user interface (GUI). When Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984 with its GUI, it was a game changer, altering the way we interacted with computers.
However, Apple wasn’t the first major company to offer a computer with a GUI. A decade prior to the Machintosh’s release, the first GUI-based system was offered. It was offered with anywhere from 96 to 512 KB of RAM, upgradable in 128 KB steps for roughly $4,000 USD each. It had a 2.5 MB disk drive and a screaming CPU speed of 5.88 MHz. You could pick one up in 1979, depending on features and memory, for somewhere in the low $30,000 USD range. In 2022 dollars, that’s roughly $121,000 USD.
Today’s trivia question then is, what company offered the first computer with a graphical operating system and what was the system called?
