GUIs changed the human-computer interface from CLI “remember and type” to GUI “recognize and point”. The latter has reduced cognitive load at least for simple

GUIs changed the human-computer interface from CLI “remember and type” to GUI “recognize and point”. The latter has reduced cognitive load at least for simple tasks. The fragmentation of different Unix desktops was always greater than Unix cli tools, which really held back adoption since “recognition” didn’t work across vendors’ systems. I evaluated Unix desktop UIs for a while in the late 90s (after X started to be the winner but before KDE/GNOME wars were in full swing). Two things of note then. While lagging in market share, DEC/DigitalUnix had the most fully featured GUI tools. And SGI IRIX was the first to try to integrate the browser and hyperlinks to their desktop. That idea did not actually originate when Microsoft Windows started tying the two.