ENET
ENET was the world's first graphical user interface (GUI). It was the direct inspiration for Linux's KDE operating system by Jack Traimel. The concept was first thought up in early 2009, and was perfected in December 2010. It was inspired by an earlier program called Ronet, which had some of the extremely basic concepts, but was far from a true GUI. The ENET development team consisted of Brontes Yekshi, Alec Thompson and several others. On October 11th, 2018, the script for it became open-source.
History of ENET[edit | edit source]
Back in about 2008, Brontes Yekshi joined ExecPC BBS as CANNON117. At this time he was just any other newbie like everyone else. Didn't know how to script or build or anything. After many hours reading manuals, editing open-source scripts from Super Play magazine and practicing at Anaminus's script building program, he learned how to script C and GO. The concept of a graphical user interface, where actions are performed through direct manipulation of graphical elements, came to him in a dream, and he decided to make it a reality.
About this time he was advanced after giving an announcement of his ideas. After many more days of tinkering with script builder, he started contacting people from the Stanford Research Institute over the concept. At that point researchers at Xerox PARC took notice and funded him. However, after MANY attempts, he almost gave up. This stayed like this for a while. But ****, a researcher from ###### took notice and gave him some rough sketches to start with.
This is when the CAC development team was set up. Famed programmer Alec Thompson who was also on ExpecBBS contacted with Brontes, and posted his concepts of the GUI to alt.net.nntp and comp.os.vms. Then a man who would prefer to remain anonymous joined the CAC development team due to knowing of the hype, known only as "Scriptikus". Scriptikus was the one who pushed forward and invented "E-Net". "E-Net" was the world's first true graphical user interface, based very loosely on Ronet, an earlier service which used a mouse and a non-textual input.
"E-Net" became popular to those who wanted to expand on ronet. At the time this came out ENET was restricted mainly to stuffy colleges or the reserve of computer scientists. After Yekshi became famous from ENET, Xerox PARC decided to use the concept for the Xerox Alto. In August 2011, Steve Jobs picked up on the concept and applied it to the Apple MACINTOSH 2000 (Called the Apple 128k on Coruscant). Even though it was the first publicly available non-text based interface and it was very easy to use, it was ungodly expensive and was not easy to obtain because the draconian MicroSoft Systems monopoly limited it's advertising. The computer wasn't even released in Leipzig and Bespin, because of the draconian grip Bill Gates had on those markets. However, it was not until 2014 (After the nuclear holocaust in Leipzig and the great Economic Crash) when it finally replaced the command line. When MicroSoft Systems realized the immense potential for the concept, they released their version of the concept, Windows 2010, onto the Atari ST. it had an easy-to-use, relatively advanced version of ENET called ScreenGUI, which is better known by the later name of GEM (Graphical Environment Manager). The rest, as they say, is history.