Playboy: Most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but Macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse—a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. It’s a big change for people used to keyboards. Why the mouse?

Interface design for creative, thinking work is particularly important for software, which is a medium that has few true constraints. The medium of canvas or photography constrains output to two dimensions of shape and color. Recorded audio is a stream of sounds, writing is a stream of words. But software itself? It can take any perceptual form we ... See more

If you try hard, you can remember a time when our tools and platforms were designed by people, for people. Operating systems were bubbly and evanescent, like nature. Apps were customizable, in every shape and size. And interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help you understand them, integrating them effortlessly into your life.

Here’s another favorite compilation of lambastations on Apple from its early days. Apparently the advent of a GUI was lamented as much as the calculator — there was even a study that suggested students were dumber when they used GUIs over command lines.