GUI didn’t make computers more powerful. It made them human.
Before GUI, computers mostly meant terminals and commands — great for experts, not for everyday people. Earlier, I thought UI/UX was just designing the fancy interface. It was only after a few years of actually working in it that I understood its real importance.
GPT stands for General Purpose Technology — broad, foundational technologies that other things get built on top of, like electricity, the internet, or AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. What I’d argue is that the GUI is also a general purpose technology, because it’s what lets a regular person actually use a computer to get things done.
And suddenly, a “normal person” could sit down and do things: learn CAD, use complex software, play games, listen to music, edit photos, write docs — just by clicking what they see. That’s the same reason we can use smartphones, smartwatches, ATMs, kiosks, and car screens without a manual.
There’s a scene in the movie Jobs that captures this perfectly. Steve Wozniak shows a customer a board full of raw chips and circuits, and the customer pushes back — he wants a usable computer, with a mouse, a display, a monitor, not a pile of bare components. Wozniak’s response is that this is state-of-the-art technology. He’s right about the technology, but he’s missing the point: state-of-the-art means nothing to a regular person if they can’t actually use it. That’s exactly the same tension with UI.
Strip away the GUI and what’s left is HTML, API calls, and endless lines of code — inaccessible to anyone who isn’t a developer. As a product designer, my job is turning that underlying complexity into an interface a regular person can actually use.
The internet connected computers. GUI connected humans to computers.
That tension is what excites me about the role — pushing back on engineers when “it works” isn’t the same as “it’s usable,” and giving PMs the accessibility their customers actually need.
-KAUSHIK