Wikijunior:How Things Work/GUI (Graphical User Interface) GUI
(gOO-EE), also known as Graphical User Interface, is not as
complex as one might expect. In reality, we come into contact
with a GUI every day we are on our computers! You are probably
using a GUI right now to read this page. A user interface is a
way to have a person communicate with a computer. In the very
earliest computers, user interfaces were usually a bunch of
switches that a user would change to change what the computer
was to do. This method was slow and the users had to know the
code that the computer would understand. Only a small number of
people used this method and as computers improved, better ways
to talk to computers were invented. Eventually a Command Line
Interface (CLI) was developed that would allow a user to type in
commands that the computer would interpret. A user had a
keyboard and a display to see the results. This proved to be a
much better way for people to communicate with computers and is
still a favorite method for so