And when we strip away all the chrome—all the Aero and Paper and Frosted Glass, all the evidence of the “design systems” we have poured billions into developing and maintaining—we come face to face with a skeleton of XEROX PARC’s 1973 invention.

The Macintosh OS was a revolution. Without the command line interface, you either talked to the computer with your mouse, or not at all. The market for people using computers suddenly became exponentially larger, because the interface was more accessible to a less technical audience.

The transition from the CLI to the GUI abstracted away the laborious verbal communication between humans and computers and replaced it with visually appealing, expensively designed interfaces.