Think the Mac GUI was always as slick as it is now, with its brushed metal, translucent windows, animated dock other bits of eye candy? Think again. John Wells has compiled a set of screenshots of most major Mac OS releases going all the way back to System 1.0, and what's most striking, at least for me, is how little the GUI changed during its first ten years. Sure, there were some attempts at adding color and texture, but the fact is that System 7.5, released in 1994, doesn't really look a whole lot different from System 1.0, released ten years earlier. Meanwhile, during those same ten years, Windows progressed from the execrable interface of Windows 1.0 to Windows 95, which — while certainly not gorgeous — really did give 7.5 a run for its money. It's little wonder that Steve Jobs scrapped almost the entire GUI when he returned to Apple in the late 90s, replacing it with OSX's Aqua interface (which is what 7.5 could have been if Jobs had been at Apple earlier in the decade, instead of in exile at NeXT).

[Via TUAW]