From the article: "we’ve had graphical user interfaces for mere four centuries."
What's the graphical user interface from around 1600? Or did he mean "four decades"?
The oldest GUI of which I am aware is General Railway Signal's NX system, first installed in 1937.[1] These used engraved letters in white on black, with a sans-serif font with fixed line width. There were earlier control boards, but this was the first system which had active systems to assist the operator in routing trains. In previous systems, operators set signals and threw switches. With NX, operators selected a path for an entering train, and lights lit up at all the places it could exit. Pressing an exit light set all the necessary switches and signals. All this was interlocked against conflicts for safety.
Following the next sentence, "One of the key turning points was in 1973, when Xerox introduced Alto, [...]" I think it's safe to assume the author meant decades, not centuries.
I'm honestly not sure what the author's referring to, but if you consider things like a table of contents, page numbers, indices, footnotes, and reference sections to be part of a book's GUI, then we've had GUIs almost as long as we've had books. Though I admit it's a bit of a stretch. :)
It's funny how the article praises large x-height and low-contrast strokes, yet it is written in Garamond, a font with small x-height and high-contrast strokes.
Personally I like small x-height and high-contrast strokes, so I find the article very readable. But I think fonts with these features require higher-DPI displays. Consider Computer Modern, which is beautiful on paper but unreadable at low resolution.
I wonder if the studies mentioned in the article took this into account. Were they testing readability on low-res screens, paper, or what? Would you get different results if you changed the medium?
Just a technicality, but a 1080p display can be considered 'retina' if the display is small enough or typically viewed from a far distance. The display on the iPhone 6 Plus is 1080p. It qualifies as a 'Retina display' because of its high pixel density and the typical viewing distance of 1 foot.
Computer Modern on modern displays looks very good (even plain ones, not just retina and such). It's totally possible to use these fonts for websites, for example.
I noticed this page's text is rendered with nice fi and ffi ligatures. Yet, they are individual characters. How do you coax that out of a browser? I see the CSS references a bunch of .woff files.
Also: Don't capitalize every word of control labels. That's amateur-hour. They're not titles or proper nouns, and capitalizing them leaves you no option when you DO refer to a title or proper noun.
What's the graphical user interface from around 1600? Or did he mean "four decades"?
The oldest GUI of which I am aware is General Railway Signal's NX system, first installed in 1937.[1] These used engraved letters in white on black, with a sans-serif font with fixed line width. There were earlier control boards, but this was the first system which had active systems to assist the operator in routing trains. In previous systems, operators set signals and threw switches. With NX, operators selected a path for an entering train, and lights lit up at all the places it could exit. Pressing an exit light set all the necessary switches and signals. All this was interlocked against conflicts for safety.
[1] http://www.rrsignalpix.com/grsnx.html