How could I have modern computers without GUIs?

Question

Even though text-based terminals still see specialty use cases, modern general-purpose computers generally run graphical software and have a graphical user interface (GUI). This includes everything from low-end cell phones and some computer peripherals like printers, to fairly high-end servers.

I'd like for computers to be roughly on par technically with what we have today, but with user interfaces that are predominantly text-based. It's okay if these computers work with text blocks and things like that (for example, like how the IBM 5250 series of terminals worked), but except for graphically oriented work such as image editing, there should be minimal graphics.

Given that in our world, personal computers started becoming graphical pretty much as soon as they were powerful enough to run a graphical user interface at acceptable speeds, and some even earlier, how can I reasonably explain that GUIs never became mainstream?

Note that these computers need not be expert-only systems; I just want their interfaces to be predominantly text-based rather than predominantly graphical as is the case today in our world.

Also, to clarify, since there seems to be widespread confusion about this: Lack of a graphical user interface does not imply a lack of graphical capability. Take the original IBM PC model 5150 as an example; with the exception of those equipped only with a MDA graphics card, the software running on those often used text-based data entry with graphical visualization modes (what we in modern terms might call more or less accurate "print preview"). For example, something similar to the early versions of Microsoft Word for DOS or how early versions of Lotus 1-2-3 used different graphics cards and monitors to display data and graphs. Instead of thinking "no graphics at all", think "graphics only as add-ons to text, rather than as a primary user interaction element".

And since lots of answers imply that the only alternatives are pure command-line based interfaces and GUIs, let me remind you of tools like Norton Commander. I used Norton Commander back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and still use look-alikes such as Midnight Commander to this day, and can guarantee that those can provide a perfectly useful environment for file management and launching applications that do not in any way depend on more than a text console. There is even a general term for these; Text-based User Interface, or TUI.

Answer 1

As almost anyone who ever used shell would say, a text based UI is much more comfortable, fast, easy to develop and just BETTER. The big problem, though, is that it's a language you have to know prior to doing anything with your computer. This is the main advantage of a GUI.

So I think what you should consider is a way to explain why computers can always presume that the users "speak their language". I see a few options:

• Computers started out as a very elitist technology, and knowing the language is a kind of status symbol. This would give people the motivation to learn, and developers the motivation not to appeal to less-sophisticated audiences, because that would ruin their brand. soon, the language is just common knowledge.
• The language in the world is in the first place very accurate and structured. There is always exactly one way to say everything. (I think this could be very interesting to develop, but also quite hard)
• The language of the computers either developed very fast or co-evolved with the human understanding of it, i.e. the computers would "learn" a new word, this would be made famous and everyone would know this new word.

Answer 2

One simple change:

Never invent a Computer Mouse

No matter how comforting a graphical user interface (GUI) is, it wouldn't be nearly as comfortable and useful without the invention of the computer mouse (and later touch interfaces).

While text interfaces stem from times and are still designed for use with only/primarily keyboards, you cannot comfortably nor reliably make use of any GUI without having a mouse or any other 'pointer' available to select things and interact with them.

The invention of the computer mouse and thus the pointer brought with it the era of pointy-clicky, a derogative term referring to virtual buttons and interactable areas that are fully virtual as opposed to the hardware reality of a keyboard. Now instead of having to work with a limited set of input functionality the only limit the amount of pixels a display can show (if you abuse scrolling not even the screen-size will be a hindrance for your mad interface experiments).

The combination of mouse/touch and GUI allows to cut away a layer of indirection that will always be around when you have to type in something and confirm your command before anything can happen. Even though you could react to every keystroke directly, there will be a finite set of interactions per program state, while there's a potential unlimited set of interactions that can be made with mouse/touch.

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Elaboration on the evolution of your interfaces:

Now even if you do only have an indirect way of interaction, GUIs will eventually emerge. Although your GUIs will be massively different from the GUIs we are used to (and have come to hate love).
The eventual GUIs will be more of a graphically enhanced text interface (GETI) and the graphics will be used to display things such as video, images, make some nice backgrounds or gradients, etc. the classic prompt will be unlikely to disappear.

Eventually it is also likely that voice-input becomes more common. Voice-input will simply be an addition and pseudo-replacement for the keyboard but cannot fully replace it unless voice-processors become way better than they are in our timeline or your software becomes more lenient and outfitted with pseudo-intelligence that can guess what you're intending to do and assist/clarify by asking you additional input when needed.

Answer 3

Slightly alternative answer.

You could have had a major breakthrough in voice recognition in the early days of the computer. The effect of this could be that interfacing would evolve around using voice and ear, as opposed to eyes and hands.

The added benefit of this is that you can continue using your hands and eyes to perform certain tasks (e.g. you're fixing a car and asking the computer for help in the mean time).

(This in turn means that no effort is put into developing GUI's for computers, but debugging/configuring might be done using a CLI)

Answer 4

The affirmation that "modern general-purpose computers generally run graphical software and have a graphical user interface (GUI)" is simply false. The vast majority of servers have no GUI; see "headless server". They live in rows upon rows of racks and can be accessed only over the network. The computers behind search engines, on-line storage services, web-based mail services, enterprise resource planning software, questions and answers boards such as this one, content management systems, the computers providing file, print and streaming services, and in general the computers which serve the interconnected documents forming the world-wide web do not have graphical user interfaces (with, of course, the rare exceptions expected from everything in IT). A better formulation would be "workstations (and gamestations) generally have GUIs"; workstations have generally had GUIs for a very long time. The windowing system in current Linux distribution is based on the X11R6 protocol, first released in 1994.

The first major class of mass-marketed applications which used full-screen graphics were games. Games ran in full screen graphical mode on the ZX Spectrum. The first GUI-based "killer applications" were desktop publishing and pre-press work.

The major problem I see with character-cell interfaces everywhere is multi-language support. A computer which can show very many thousands of different characters on a character-cell display can also show graphics on the same display -- a computer which can show 中华人民共和国 can certainly display graphics. And since it can display graphics, it will display graphics: some young student at a university somewhere will write a graphical interface and game over. Unless...

The only way to preserve character-cell interfaces for the masses is to make them compulsory; suppose that the domination of the computer industry by a big blue three-letter corporation had not been met with anti-trust challenges from the government of the greatest power in the world. Suppose that on the contrary that domination would have been enforced by the powers that be; no such thing as open-source operating systems like UNIX, no such thing as simple-minded operating systems like MS-DOS and the classic Mac OS; all computers run safe, secure and reliable operating systems like OS/360. Wouldn't we all be happy with the character-cell variant of the Common User Architecture?

Answer 5

I think that GUI are so popular because visual learners consists the majority of population. With 2 of every 3 people being visual learners they consist the largest market, same as most things are made for right handed people. If you make Auditory learners the majority of the population, fallowed by kinesthetic with visual learners distant third, the market will adapt and the GUIs will be expensive niche market.

I'm a programmer and I don't like text UI. I know very well how powerfull they are, I learned to be quite good with bash, and use it every day at work to administer our UNIX servers, but if I had choice I would allways choose GUIs. That's how my brain is wired. I learned to use Emacs but I always go for Atom & Visual Studio.

P.S. Image taken from Successfully Using Visual Aids in Your Presentation

Answer 6

Your world does not have pixel-capable screens. With the components readily available, one could be built only crudely, at impractically large sizes (billboard size or greater), and with large gaps in between the dots. But no hardware or software (ray-tracing, etc) was ever developed that would make good use of this, and no one except maybe sci-fi authors really sees much value in such a thing.

If all you have to make desktop monitors out of is arrays of seven segment displays, then you have a text-based user experience built into the hardware. If the monitors are literally made out of 7-segment displays (or something like them), and particularly if you bring in a historical/legal basis for that, then you don't really need any tortured argument about why they don't just draw pictures on the things, because the capability isn't there.

You can also offer some other side benefits of this that are off-limits to us in the real world. Like having the monitor be just another cheap USB device, or Bluetooth device, with virtually zero power consumption. And you can bring back ASCII art in a big way.

This conception of technology requires a divergence of technological development from the real world somewhere around 1900. Radio is in, television is out. Comic books, dime novels and penny dreadfuls are in, cinema is out. Old-fashioned seismometers and other machines that directly draw on paper are in. The advent of computers still happens, because this was done for reasons of code-breaking and mathematical research (Babbage, Zuse, others). Blinkenlights are in.

Cheap and accessible photography is out; most people can only afford one or two family portraits in their lifetimes, and it's all film based. But for the price, the quality standards are very high, and portraits are typically stereographic (gives more flavor for divergent technological progress).

Printers are very fancy, very cheap (and the ink is even cheaper!!), and very fast, with advanced typography capabilities, and paper is incredibly cheap and easily recycled. Even sophisticated book binding is a standard feature on a very affordable printer.

If you need a "nuclear option", further reinforce suspension of disbelief with copyright law. In your world, equipment manufacturers would be held liable for any device capable of showing a photograph or facsimile of a copyrighted oil painting. (If you go in this direction, have "the Betamax case" occur 100 years earlier, applied to single-frame film photography, and decided more or less in the opposite from real history. The real case was a 5-4 split decision!) Strictly control photography licenses on this basis, further accounting for the high price and therefore rarity and superior, exalted quality of photographs.

For all these reasons, no one has much motivation to develop technology capable of showing pictures, and the work it would take to match the analog capabilities with any digital graphical system would be far too high for amateurs to mount a successful attempt. Even serious efforts with serious budget would be perceived as crude toy projects, or worse, as illicit subterfuge, without any legitimate practical use.

All these background factors will hopefully reinforce the divergence away from pixel graphics and create a huge barrier to introducing it into your world. ("Such a monitor would require way too much power!" "Stereoscopy would be next to impossible!" "You would have to upset 100+ years of copyright law and legal precedent!" "Even simple line art would look like garbage!")

"There's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?"

Answer 7

Make porn and video games not a thing.

Now who cares to make computers handle more graphics? Good luck on getting people to believe it.

Make mobile computers useful/desirable earlier.

If we had hand held computers that could do something useful or cool before anyone had gotten graphics running, or when graphics would have been battery prohibitive, text only could have become the standard way everyone uses computers.

Make programming much more popular

If most people write at least some of the programs they use and text is the (easiest) way to interact with them text will be popular. This could happen if copyright got out of control or people lost trust in distributed programs.

Make illiteracy or functional illiteracy a bigger issue.

You don't want to look like the only guy at the meeting who needs pictures, and you really don't want to imply you boss can't read.

Answer 8

I'm surprised so few people have touched on the possible cultural motivators that would limit/prevent the development of GUIs.

My first thought was (no pun intended), "iconoclasm".

In a world where iconoclastic religion holds sway, people will believe that GUIs are evil and/or degenerate. Words are important; unnecessary representation of things are an affront to God.

@Dotan Reis's idea regarding elitism has real potential too. If the early computer users were both rich AND smart, then a personality cult of computer-elitism would lead people to only ever want to use text-based interfaces.

Answer 9

• Stop the push to put a computer on every desk; TUIs can be used by experts, but GUIs were all but required to make the jump from "specialist equipment" to "general use equipment."
• Never see a capitalist-driven push to create a consumer workstation market (TUIs work for trained professionals, and don't demand a GUI)
• Increase the culture of elitism towards computers; it has forever been a trend (although diminishing as time goes on) with computer/IT people to prefer more difficult means to prove oneself; many IT guys today "prefer" Linux, but can't provide a non-cardboard-cutout argument as to why. Command Line/Terminal being the same deal.
• Hamstring the display market. Keep monitors primitive, mono-colored.
• Introduce a terrible executed marketing ploy for GUIs; turn the consumers and market off the idea
• Have major OS creators/communities view GUIs as inefficient and ineffective. More elitism.

...Basically kill the capitalist market drive, and introduce bad press and elitism to run GUIs away.

Answer 10

Search, don't sort.

Google Desktop made redundant 90% of the Windows GUI in 2004.

Apple implemented similar features in Vanilla OSX at a similar time.

No more clicking through sub folders trying to remember where you stored something. Simply remember some fact about it: Words in the title, words in the content, last modified date. Enter some of those parameters as a search, and the file appears instantly.

In terms of what you could do to move from "we don't use GUIs much" to "we don't use GUIs", either improve A.I. search capabilities, or send Microsoft bankrupt.

With MS out of the way, your computer's GUI would look like the Google home page. Blank white space, a single text box for input. At that point, it's not really a GUI any more.

Answer 11

An important thing to consider here is that once you've gotten past the steeper learning curve, working with text-based input is frequently much easier than using a GUI.

An example: Suppose I have a directory containing a few thousand files, scattered across various subdirectories. I want to sort them out into separate directories based on various criteria. Let's say I want to move all the files starting with "foo-" and ending in ".log" that were created in the last day.

In a GUI, the most efficient way I can do that is probably to sort the files by file extension, then go into each subdirectory, find the block of files starting in "foo-" and ending in ".log", then right click on each individually, open up properties, check the modified date, then drag it into the new directory if it was modified in the last day. Then I move to the next file and do the same thing. And hope I don't make any mistakes while manually doing this a few hundred times. And in practice, if all I have is a GUI, I'm just not going to reorganize those files because there's no way I'm going through all that.

With a command line, I type find ! -type d -name 'foo-*.log' -mtime -1 -exec mv '{}' 'other_directory/{}' + and I'm done in 5 seconds. And in practice, it takes about 5 minutes because I don't use the -mtime argument that often and I need to look it up in the manual real quick (which consists of typing man find, then /modified to find the right section).

For most tasks, the difference isn't quite that extreme, but the command line is almost always the more powerful option. The command line version certainly looks more complicated (and to be fair, it is), but once I learn it, I can get things done so much faster than I could otherwise. Aside from my web browser, the only reason I use a GUI at work is so I can keep multiple terminals on the screen at the same time. Unless the task is specifically graphical in nature, a GUI just feels like a toy to me.

Now consider your requirement that the systems not be "Expert-only". I won't deny that right now, proficiency with the command line is generally expert-only, but think about average difference in computer literacy between a 14 year old and a 74 year old. The adult has had just as much time to learn the skills, and yet they struggle with it. But the kid grew up with this stuff and finds that it comes naturally. If you create a society in which most people learn how to use a command line as an "Experts-only" skill, then in a generation or two, it'll just be another trivial skill that everyone learned as a kid.

Edit: A couple people have mentioned GUIs that can filter files according to modification date, so here's a slightly more complicated example. This will sort all .log files into directories of the form 'logs/2017-05-20/' based on their modification time, creating the directories as needed.

find ! -type d -name '*.log' -exec bash -c \
"export DIR=\$(date +logs/%F -d\$(stat -c @%Y '{}')); mkdir -p \$DIR; mv '{}' \$DIR/\$(basename '{}')" \;

Answer 12

Just a little suggestion: You might also want the data entry keyboard to be totally different. The guy who is most responsible for the GUIs and mouse we used today, Douglas Engelbart, had originally developed a chord based input system where instead of having buttons for every letter the user had a single handed keyboard that used combinations to create letter - like chords on a guitar. It's worth looking into.

Answer 13

Well, you kind of kill it when you say that Norton Commander, Emacs, vi and friends don't count as GUI. At that point, there's hardly anything left that does count as GUI, perhaps just the visual fluff you get from high-resolution (e.g. more than 80x25 and such) displays.

So, let's assume that's exactly what you mean. No fluff.

Why do we get so much fluff? When it first comes, it has a certain novelty aspect. But that wears of rather quickly, and is actually quite discouraging to many users. Just look at all those examples like rounded corners, gloss, transparent windows and similar - you show them off for a generation or two, just to flex your muscles in front of a crowd of fawning fanboys, they get copied all over and used in all the wrong applications, and then the novelty wears off, and the fashion changes. Look at Windows 10 compared to Vista (all that gloss and transparency!), XP (rounded everything!). Windows 9/10 design is simple, clean, unobtrusive; a nice show of what remains when you get rid of the fluff.

So why do the graphics remain, rather than going back to text interfaces? The answer is actually quite simple - it makes a lot of complicated problems easier. Mind you, I'm not saying it's a panacea. It isn't. Text interfaces still have plenty of benefits:

• Friendlier for remote terminals
• Easier human auditing, with easy logging of everything that happens at the terminal
• Easier showing of history in general
• Easier composition of text-only applications (though this fades when any sort of "GUI" enters the equation, even in text-mode)

Now, of course, graphics had a head-start in applications that were, well, graphical. Computer-aided design. Publishing. It's not really a long list. Even today, some people can't stomach using a graphical interface for things as complicated as DTP - at best, they have a graphical window into what the layout is going to look like on paper (or what have you), while they do the actual editing in something like TeX, or even MarkDown or (gasp!) HTML.

Why did graphics win on the desktop in general? As noted before, text-mode applications still had great "GUIs", you still had full-blown integrated environments with all the cool things true GUIs give you, like keyboard shortcuts, menus, mouse control, hinting, all the nice discoverability.

Exactly because of those advanced users that everyone here is calling to the rescue. Why? Because there was no compatibility anywhere. Everyone did text-based applications their way. Even attempts at standardisation like POSIX, or even MS-DOS (which was designed to be quite a bit different than it actually turned out, mostly for - guess what - compatibility with IBM DOS, which got released slightly earlier) mostly failed. Even at the IBM PC (and its clones), where Microsoft quickly gained dominance, every application had its own idea about what commands should be named, what actions should do what, how to format their input and output data. Nobody tried to make common interfaces, formats. There was just endless arguments about who was better. There was no end in sight.

And then Xerox came with their revolutionary PARC. Now, mind you, this was tons of things that were utterly impractical when the research teams actually designed them. There were no computers powerful enough to run their systems, while also being anything close to affordable by any family, or really even corporations. But computers got powerful quickly, and everyone went to the well. Atari, Amiga, Apple, Microsoft - everyone adopted the same basic paradigms. Everyone also added some of their own, but those were also quickly spread in the new world - a world of inter-operation and compatibility. In no small part because the ones who cared about compatibility started winning. MS-DOS wasn't the best OS, not by far. Unless you cared about the fact that it run pretty much everything. You could take your applications from Dr-DOS, IBM DOS, and a few dozen other Something-DOSes and OSes, and run them on MS-DOS. Which OS do you buy? The one that has you locked-in to a couple of software packages, or the one that gives you pretty much all of them? Which OS do you design software for?

Windows weren't the first graphical OS, but that didn't matter anymore. The drive for compatibility was already there, and in full blow. Use a mouse to point at a button, press the mouse button, action happens. Every application on every system behaved the same. You had windows, you had buttons, you had scrollbars and menus - and there was a lot of pressure to unify their behaviour as much as reasonable, while still appearing somewhat different. And even when platforms differed (slightly), two applications on the same platform never did - something Linux still struggles with to this very day, with the misguided idea that it's the application, that should pick the GUI, rather than the user. What did "advanced" users do? They utterly and entirely ignored it, happy with their proprietary (funny, eh? :)) and incompatible CLIs. Advanced users are a lot more invested in their platform, simply because the invested so much time an effort in becoming proficient in that one platform. Advanced users are the bane of progress.

So the solution isn't to make everyone an advanced user, quite the opposite. Expect no effort from your users. Start with environments that try to standardise their interfaces - use the same keyboard shortcuts, naming conventions, formats. Think about accessibility, not just efficiency. Sure, ls is fine if you have a horrible keyboard or you can't type very well - but list is a hell of a lot more accessible. Use aliases if you need to, but even those should be conforming with other systems - you're not going to keep carrying your aliases over to other computers you need to use; just stick to defaults. Kick out anyone who doesn't play nice. Get rid of the hipsters, who not only can't recognise progress - they sneer at the very idea of progress.

A nice, compatible and mostly standardised interface will give you the inertia you need. Applications like Norton Commander, not command-line ls. Applications like Turbo Pascal, not vi. Search by wildcard, not regular expressions (but feel free to keep the advanced option!). Sort "by human", not "by computer" - Folder 100 should never end up in sort order between Folder 2 and Folder, deal with it. Learn everything the graphical OSes did right, and use it too. Don't consider remote terminals too much, even smart terminals - you'd never get a real interactive applications there - bandwidth is less of an issue than in a graphical application, but latency is just as horrible; in some cases even more so. Standardise rich terminals, streaming-text-only isn't good enough by far, and neither is just text positioning on a fixed background. Make it real smart, like what true GUIs managed to do.

Keep focus on freely integrated systems, rather than large proprietary bags of tricks (and no, keeping it "FSF" or "OSS" doesn't make it any less of a "large proprietary bag of tricks"). Have developers all over the world coöperate on what they're doing, rather than competing purely out of spite and other misguided initiatives. Find ways to engage users, improve their productivity, instead of arbitrarily introducing differences just to make conversion harder. Instead of ten competing packages "of everything", modularize - give users easy way to make choices without making things appear too complex. Remember how Turbo Pascal, despite being an IDE, actually allowed you to plug-in a custom linker, compiler, debugger...? Encourage that model. The company that's great at writing compilers isn't necessarily the best at linkers. Introduce productivity and discoverability features like auto-completion that mostly had to wait for GUIs in our history.

Does that leave us with all the problems solved? Almost. There are still things that graphics just does better. Layouting is much easier with higher resolution, resolution-agnostic design is much easier with higher resolution. Allow improvements over the text-mode ideal - for example, allow combining multiple "tile" sizes on one screen, so that you can e.g. have text written "as-if-in-80x25", while allowing other elements to be "as-if-in-80-40". Allow graphical elements to be included in a text-mode application - so that you don't have to keep changing the whole screen just to have a WYSIWYG look at your document, or to show graphs inside of a spreadsheet.

This is the truly complicated part - at some point, it becomes harder to justify that having two ways of doing fundamentally the same thing is a good thing; why have "hybrid" rendering on a Haswell machine, when you can render everything in graphics mode just as quickly, while keeping things simpler and prettier? Use accessories that can exploit extremely cheap low-resolution displays to keep better track of your whole system - or even give you cool graphical "pretend" interface in a similar way those Nintendo Mini-arcades had, without giving up on the benefits of text-mode?

Answer 14

Your link gives a clue:

The Xerox Alto systems, because of their power and graphics, were used for a variety of research purposes in to the fields of human-computer interaction and computer usage.

They built a GUI that is recognisable as the concepts still used today, and then researched human-computer interaction, which presumably just refined the ideas already raised, but more cynically may have justified the preconceived notions.

An early “bright idea” got funded, and directly inspired the major GUIs that appeared in consumer products.

Arguably, the ideas were ahead of the hardware and early implementations were inferior to what might have been.

If some different “bright idea” got researched, studied, and refined in the early days before commercial products, we might have gone a different route. In fact, a paradigm that was not so graphics intensive might have done better, sooner, before machines got powerful enough for the GUI to really be practical.

Then, if the general public had caught on to concepts that transcended “direct manipulation” and “what you see is what you get (what you see is all you got)” like was felt by the experts, then even when things got prettier the notions of direct manipulation (only) might not make the same inroads.

It would be cool to know what concepts / manipulation paradigm might have been developed that would be better than a plain CLI.

Answer 15

Amazon Echo, Alexa, et al, are computers without a GUI. Heck, I even say OK Google to my phone to get it to do stuff like text my friend (Funny story: No matter what I said to my first cell phone with speech recognition, it always misinterpreted it..."Call mom", "Calling Brian". "Call Neil", "Calling Brian".) I predict that in 10 years we won't interact with a GUI as much as we talk to it or use "texting" (eg natural typing) for those times when talking would be rude (such as on a plane)

Answer 16

Have everyone in your world have bad to zero eye vision!
This will enforce the need for screen readers. Screen readers with GUIs are a real pain. It is much easier to only read text than describe a window for example.

Maybe this will have some more implications on your world, but it is definitely doable.

Answer 17

There are a few general ways to make modern computers that are not GUI intensive.

Change Computer History:

This is somewhat of an obvious choice, because there were a few big pushes in computing that made the GUI happen. On our own planet Earth, computers became huge in the countries that won WWII and the cold war, A.K.A. Britain and America. This connects to a recent network question, "Why are all coding languages in English?". So, what's important about that? Well, America is a capitalist country, every company that hopped on the computer bandwagon created their own coding language. Just think about today, we have Haskell, C, C++, C#, Java, etc. For command line we have the Cmd on Windows, and terminal for Linux and Apple. But what if the government got more involved.

In 1965, America passes a bill that makes one American coding language, which will be used in all programming and command line. It will be developed in a similar project to the Manhattan Project, drafting the best minds in computer science, who all have to work together. All of a sudden, a huge barrier to entry is diminished, people only have to learn one new computer language instead of seven. The government also decides that they want the most powerful computers possible to run missile guidance systems, nuclear subs, etc. They don't have time for fancy stuff like graphics.

The drive for "a computer on every desk", never happens, instead the government puts a computer in every school for kids to learn. Now those kids grow up and buy their own computers, using nothing but command line.

Eventually, the technology is released to the public and a new company makes the GUI, but no one cares about that fluff, as it is in an alpha stage and is pretty crappy. It is seen as a dumb luxury like VR in the 90's and won't take off for at least another few decades, if ever.

Limit Computing:

As mentioned in another answer, the internet rules much of our life. And when bandwidth was low in the 90's we didn't send sweet memes, we sent ascii, or just words. If the bandwidth is limited, all of a sudden, images go away, the internet is text-based. Now, if you take away non-connected desktop, the government says all computers must be linked to the net at all times, there is no longer personal computing, the biggest factor is bandwidth. If bandwidth is limited, no GUI.

Limit People:

Not a great option, but if people are blind, GUI is unimportant. If people are colorblind, people don't like the way the GUI looks. It cannot convey as much meaning, so it isn't used. If people have no hands to use it, then they have to use voice dictation instead. In these cases, GUI is never bothered with.

Answer 18

pre-1988: Xerox hires a brilliant legal team

1988: Apple files suit against Microsoft, and Xerox against Apple, same as real timeline.

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Then a lot happens in 1989-1990:

Xerox wins or settles to their advantage, the patent infringement case against Apple. Then they join as plaintiff in the Apple-Microsoft look and feel case and win that too. [in the real timeline, Microsoft won the look-and-feel case in 1994, and Xerox lost theirs]

Additional Lawsuits related to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) infringement issues. Companies that developed early GUIs without accessibility features or automation capabilities settle or are found liable. Xerox escapes liability because their GUI never left the lab, and their legal team is awesome. Apple and Microsoft are liable for civil damages despite losing IP rights to Xerox. [in the real timeline, ADA rules have no teeth until 20+ years later]

New government regulations, riding on public opinion in support of the ADA requirements, make accessibility and automation capabilities mandatory on all software, and introduce federal education funding and standards for text-based computer literacy in the USA, quickly cloned in Japan and Europe.

Apple re-brands the MacIntosh as a toy and pulls out of the educational market.

Microsoft delays the launch of Windows 3.0 to remove features that infringed on Xerox's patents and add ADA compliance features. The resulting product is late, unusable, has no ecosystem support, a total flop which burns consumers and investors.

On Linux, X11R6 development stops for lack of volunteers and although you can find early versions, they have become illegal for lack of accessibility features and unmaintained (like DeCSS is today).

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1992: IBM launches OS/2 and nobody notices. Same as real time-line

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Finally, by 1995 GUIs are both academically and commercially dead:

Apple pivots to voice control as they continue to be a leader in User Experience, to compete against text interfaces.

Microsoft recovers from the Windows 3.0 fiasco by investing on a 32-bit version of MS-DOS to compete against a now GUI-less Linux.

GUI experience is now hazardous to your resume. Venture capital and research funding for GUIs dries up, like an extended version of AI Winter.

Tim Berners-Lee decides to focus on creating a free version of Gopher, abandoning work on HTTP/1.1 and X-Mosaic, so a GUI-based Internet never materializes.

Xerox kills all GUI research and never launches a product. They retain all patents even during bankruptcy, preventing others from launching a product.

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So in this timeline there is a roughly 10-year period between 1985 and 1995 where GUIs struggle to gain popularity and ultimately fail on multiple fronts, a full 20 years before "modern general-purpose computers" come along.

Answer 19

How about an option that relies neither on crippling your people, nor on them consistently being irrational and/or unimaginative?

Make the displays expensive.

If a live (that is, displaying data as that data is created) graphics-capable monitor or a projector costs as much as a car or even a house, most families aren't going to be buying one. But businesses and governments could afford to purchase some that their artists, designers, engineers, and scientists can use to work with.

Most people would be stuck with printers, or possibly character displays possibly made using relatively inexpensive technologies such as flip-dot (or flip-segment), LED segments, or nixie tubes that, at least in your world, are unable to be shrunken down enough to make a useful desktop graphics display, but are sufficiently compact for a workable desktop character display.

This does, unfortunately, mean that live television is likely to never become mainstream. Movies however, should be fine, possibly even at home. Rather than showing them on a real-time graphics display like we do in the real world these days, just use a projector and film. The key characteristics of film being that displaying it is simple: just shine a bright white light through it with a lens to focus it, and that it lacks a fast write to read turnaround time, so it's unsuitable for live graphics. Television may end up more like an audio-visual newspaper or magazine subscription, with film delivered to your door on a regular basis, rather than a live broadcast.

For those wanting a print preview in their home, simply add an extra cartridge (or several, for colors) to printers, filled with dry erase ink. Bundle in some laminated paper, and there you go: print a preview with the erasable ink onto the laminated paper, look it over, then print the final result on regular paper with permanent ink while erasing the preview paper for reuse later.

Answer 20

how can I reasonably explain that GUIs never became mainstream?

Computers entered the mass market at the same time as useful speech recognition and synthesis. Instead of sitting in front of screen and pressing buttons users primarily converse with computers. Which would make the concept of a GUI sound strange "What do you mean I have to learn to press this an that and then that? Why can't I just tell it what I want?".

Answer 21

Make the computers interconnected and bottlenecked by bandwidth. A low-bandwidth internet forces one to optimize the transmission of content, which is likely text-based.

From my own experiences with the initial stages of the internet, a GUI is barely usable across a network when bandwidth is low enough. Even a GUI-system specifically designed for client-server networking, such as X, is bothersome on connections like a 14k4 modem.

Before the WWW existed we used the Gopher protocol to browse information systems across the world over dial-up connections. Then the WWW was invented and the internet became more graphical, performance on graphical browsers (Mosaic, Netscape) was still agonizingly slow. Since the textual content was still the main attraction many early users used text-based browsers such as w3m and lynx to browse the web. On linux servers successors like elinks are still used today.

If there was some reason for bandwidth to simply remain constrained then GUIs might not develop at all. People would likely still create ASCII-art and TUIs would improve, maybe supporting multiple windows like i3 window manager.

Answer 22

You want a world where computers are widespread but GUIs don't exist? Simple: Find a way to make a world where everyone is totally blind - perhaps even where eyes were never able to evolve. (writing uses some equivalent of Braille)

Answer 23

Educate the public quickly

GUIs are popular because they're easy for new users to learn, and don't require as much specialized knowledge as using a CLI. For example, to change file permissions through the GUI in Linux, you can click little check-boxes labeled "read", "write", and "execute", while to change the same information with the CLI, you need to remember which bits correspond to which permissions, and do a decimal to binary conversion.

If, for some reason, computers classes became a part of compulsory education during the time when CLIs were still popular, an entire generation would grow up using them. When GUIs emerged they wouldn't seem to have much of an advantage over CLIs to the public at large. Further, CLIs - especially whatever shell(s) taught in school - would have the inertia of consensus, and people would be unwilling to change.

Answer 24

If the users are non-human, a GUI interface may present serious issues. Maybe they have compound eyes, like insects, and any sort of pixel-grid display creates serious moire fringing effects between the screen and their eyes. Or maybe they see in sonar, like bats or dolphins. How do you make a sonar screen?

If they are (almost?) human, maybe their society is a strict meritocracy (with fascistic overtones). You are not allowed to access a computer until you prove that you are intelligent enough to use one in an intelligent manner. In other words, program one. By the time you are a half-decent prgrammer, you will probably prefer a command-line interface over a GUI interface for most tasks in any case.

(If you are any sort of geek, you'll have heard the jokes about lusers and drool-proof keyboards. In this world, the geeks are the rulers).

Answer 25

I don't think this is possible, if you want to keep the possibilities of modern computers, especially if you consider Norton Commander as 'text' - since what it's really doing is abusing text to be a GUI - and most of what GUIs do is position text, outside a grid system. But one possible approach I haven't seen mentioned in other answers - text is machine readable, GUIs aren't.

This could come up in several different ways:

• Mandatory software quality testing, coming in very early on. As soon as the first software with bugs appear, and companies realise they are paying for broken products, particularly if there is a serious catastrophe like an exploding space rocket, there is a big legal and regulatory push for software to be absolutely as described, with large fees for any bugs found.

  • This manifests itself as precise specifications for input and output, and mandatory automated testing with regulatory oversight. You can automatically verify the text which is displayed, and the screen output at every state, but you can't easily automatically verify the display of a curve, and the number of possibilities with user resizable windows makes it infeasible to attempt.

• Mandatory auditing of one sort or another. All input and output must be audited for anti-fraud, or to guard against anti-consumer practices, or to mandate that computer systems from different providers perform the same way, or as a basic expectation in a digital society of how computers behave. You can audit typing and printing, but you can't really audit mouse clicks and GUI scrolling in the same way. You can audit "this picture was displayed: {}" for use with your one-off output specification, but you wouldn't want the overhead or storage costs of auditing every frame of a GUI.

• The earliest developments of computing were very focused on interpreting the text, and processing it in custom ways. e.g. government broadcast news over a text feed like the UK's old Ceefax systems, and individual people put keyword matches on the data stream which would alert them for things they found interesting. Businesses alerted on transactions, individuals played with data sets in real time - you could expect a feed of special offers from shops, from weather services, from news services, civil engineering (roadworks) in your area, up to date electricity prices, or whatever, and pick up on the things you care about. This happens early enough in your timeline that it gets embedded into the culture, and when GUIs come along, people regard them as a novelty but ultimately reject the way they can't be automated and pattern searched as too limiting, so only use them as an output device, but not as the main interaction point. You work with the structured data, maybe you show it in a GUI if it's a graph, or maybe you don't.

• The previous points interact; mandatory auditing means governments want a continual stream of input from every user, which they can search and gather population-wide statistics for, which means GUIs are only allowed to be used for display, but all input must come through a keyboard.

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The section of Mandatory software testing could come up in another approach, the reason headless servers are so popular today is that less code means a smaller attack surface for security considerations. If all software had to go through an expensive regulatory audit process (or any constraint which has a similar effect - software companies need to be insured against the risk of their code going wrong, and insurance companies charge per line of code insured, or per feature), then 'less code' would push industries towards preferring TUIs if at all possible. Since a GUI has to display text, and also graphics, it will always work out more expensive.

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Another possible deviation from real world history is that our early output devices were RADAR screens and oscilloscopes, with an electron beam being scanned left to right and modulated up and down by an analog signal. They became CRTs, which were the dominant display technology for many years.

But what if CRTs couldn't become dominant, e.g. if regulatory limits prohibited vacuum chambers in devices sold to the public, because they were too dangerous due to the risk of implosion?

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Environmental concerns, or financial rent-seeking behaviour. If you could tweak the world so that displaying a picture cost significantly more, each time, people would avoid it for normal use. e.g. if there was a 'text' screen which came with a computer, and you could buy a 'graphical' screen as an addition to go alongside it - but it could display 1000 graphics before the license ran out and needed renewing, or it cost a day of text electricity to update compared to the text screen. The market would sort out how to do everything by text, while keeping GUIs available for the occasional use, or for the wealthy.

Answer 26

Do a better job of teaching kids to read and write.

Let's draw a line between a system that is capable of doing graphics, when appropriate, and the GUI, which is to computing what "point & grunt" is to language. So your computer user has what I have on my machines (4 on or beside my desk at the moment): a window manager running on top of X, which mostly has a bunch of xterm windows on it. To interact with the computer, I use language in the form of commands, rather than pointing at something and clicking the mouse.

Now this doesn't mean I can't do graphics. I can do anything from looking at photos I've downloaded from my camera (with text commands) to viewing PDF documents (which I may have created with text-based LaTeX) to visualizing the output from the 3D seismic tomography program I'm working on (the input to which is text). I just don't have to have an icon that I click on for every single thing I want to do, and I don't have to waste time trying to figure out what those icons - potentially multiple thousands of them - are supposed to mean. (If I run into an unfamiliar text command, I can look it up in the manual or with a search engine, just as I would look up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary.)

If I need a list of commands for users not familiar with a system or application, I can use text menus, as in fact I do with the browser (qupzilla) that I'm using at the moment. It has some GUI icons. in a bar across the top, but I've never figured out exactly what they mean, because there's a handy text menu too.

GUIs, IMHO, are basically a crutch, needed because a large fraction of the population seems to be functionally illiterate.

Answer 27

Try and look at 'what' you actually want to use computing for. Will everyone still be as connected as they are these days? if so, could they just be using more powerful versions of the early mobile phones which had buttons and an LCD screen (my old Ericsson A1018 was like this.) Or are you looking more for a computerized world, but without necessarily needing the level of user input we have now?

I mean for instance, look up 'internet of things'. The basic concept is everything around us now has a computer in it (kettles, toasters) which are all inter-connected to form their own network. However, the micro-controllers within them fairly rarely have a GUI. At most, there are a lot of blenders/food processors which have buttons on them for 'smart' cooking. These are dedicated function buttons, while the micro-controller inside simply (or not so simply) reads the data from a few sensors and applies some logic to the cooking mode.

The Raspberry Pi is another good modern example. Although it is typically connected to a mouse/keyboard and TV/monitor, it needs none of these things to function. I've seen them set up as wireless computer servers; one of my colleagues has half his house automated with micro-controllers, including wifi cameras and his 3D printer, all connected through the Pi as a server. He can access his printer at work, and watch it on the camera to make sure his house isn't on fire, but the point is the Pi itself has no GUI, and the tablet or whatever he uses to access it isn't more than a dumb terminal.

IF you're talking purely about how to access the computer without the graphical interface, then the next level up (or down) would be the old DIP switch and jumper approach to computer programming/usage. I have an early Amstrad PPC512 laptop at home which consists of a monochrome LCD screen, two floppy drives, a modem and no hard disk or any sort of operating system, other than what is used on the boot floppy. Setting which floppy, or external monitor source etc. was done with an array of DIP switches on the side.

There are plenty of other good examples through computing history: the Apollo computer used during the moon landings had the DSKY interface, which was fitted with dedicated function buttons (noun, verb) and 7-segment readouts. Graphics calculators would be another example you could 'borrow' and modernize.

TLDR: Your world started with pre-GUI computers such as the Apollo guidance computer. Instead of the desktop computer/monitor becoming standard, research instead went into portable computers such as graphics calculators and early mobile phone technology, while industry focused on single use computers programmed by DIP switch. By the time mainstream internet became available linking the IOT devices together, people still predominantly relied on text-based systems like their button phones.

Something a little less anachronistic would be that, or haptic feedback devices (vibrators, or braille keypads) were invented sooner. Maybe AI was developed earlier, reducing the need for 'hands on' computing, although this begins to overlap the voice-activated approach as mentioned in a previous post.

Answer 28

Are you bound to the users being human-like? If the user's senses are not dominated by vision, you can neglect GUI, and go more on a tactile/sound/smell user interface.

Basically you can image a mole-like being using a computer.

Answer 29

Most of these answer focus on technology being held back, I am going to assume it sprints forward. Direct communication with the computer via brain waves over wires invented before GUIs.

If you use telepathy or neural implants to communicate with your computer no keyboard, mouse, GUI or etc are necessary. You have a direct brain to computer link with vastly superior reaction time.

The only possible problem is people might choose to visualize a GUI in their mind. However, I doubt that it would be helpful with direct computer to brain linkage.

Answer 30

1. Before computers are powerful enough for graphics, heavily invest in computer science education, starting from primary school. This would likely be a sound investment anyway, at the very least in hindsight.
2. Everyone will be able to use a terminal. You can't teach theoretical computer science to first graders (also large parts of it wasn't known back then), you'll start with a very practical approach to computer science, which implies heavy use of actual computers; programming. That's the part which is useful to the general population anyway, so they can automate little problems in their daily life/workplace.
3. Everyone will be able to use a terminal more efficiently than graphical programs because they already know how to and terminals are inherently better so the investment to learn GUI wouldn't be worth it.
4. There would be no need for graphical user interfaces.

That is, there would still be graphical output, but only for stuff like previewing 3D models you describe textually (it exists! It's really easy to learn and powerful in my opinion), previewing documents you wrote in something like LaTeX, viewing pictures and videos, etc.