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Before first Macintosh there was Apple II. After first Macintosh... there still was Apple II, now with Macintosh-like GUI. Read a thorough, interesting, and profusely illustrated summary of various text- and graphical-based interfaces for Apple’s ultrapopular 8-bit computer. Written and submitted by Tony Kavadias.

April 1982 issue of Byte ran a thorough article on designing the Xerox Star user interface, seen through the eyes of five Xerox employees. Read the article, get to know the ideas behind the first commercial graphical user interface ever, and see some interesting screenshots.

Byte covered Windows for the first time almost two years before its premiere. Naturally, there’ve been many interesting differences between what was described and what shipped in the final product. On top of that, the article featured a dozen screenshots and as many pictures of contemporary machines running the pre-release version of Windows. See the humble beginnings of today’s most popular GUI, and read author’s unique commentary written 21 years later!

Almost right in the middle between the premiere of Macintosh and Windows 1.0, Personal Computing devoted its cover and many pages to a debate whether graphical user interfaces are really the way to go. The article also featured many quotes of prominent figures of that time.