Many software systems employ graphical user interface. What sorts of Essay

Many software systems employ graphical user interface. What sorts of user interface were employed before GUIs was available How - Essay Example On the other hand, liveware refers to the users i.e. human beings, who operate the systems by issuing commands to be executed by the system (Anderson 2001). However, for these users to be able to input data and commands, which instruct the system to perform various actions, there must be a way through which they can interact with the computer, which is commonly referred to as human computer interface (HCI) (Stephenson 2001). For example, if a user wants to open an already existing document, he must issue an ‘open’ command to the system through the computer interface available in his system. Currently, there are two major HCI i.e. command line (CLI) and the graphical user interfaces (GUI). Command line interfaces were the most widely used before technological advances in programming resulted to the designing of window based operating systems, which enabled users to interact with their computers through GUI. In a command driven interface, the user uses the keyboard to type commands, which are acceptable to the computer, after which the results are displayed on the screen in form of text. This type of interface came in to use in the early 1950s, an invention which was motivated by the introduction of teletypewriters, which demanded instant display of results (Stephenson 2001). Before this, batch interfaces were used, which are considered to have been non-interactive as they only required the user to input all the data in order for processing to begin, after which there was no opportunity for inputting more data until after all the data was processed and output was given (Stephenson 2001). The disc operating system (DOS) is one of the environments that make use of the command line interface. In order to be able to operate such an interface, it is a must for one to have excellent skills and understanding of the various internal and external commands, which follow predetermined syntaxes (Gookin 2004). For example, if a user intends to view files located in the hard drive i.e. the hard disk, he would have to type a command, which would order the system to display all the files as per the user’s request. The syntax in such a context would appear as follows; c:\dir after which you press enter to display the contents. To access a removable storage media named drive E, one has to type a special command designed for that purpose. This would appear as follows; c:\e: then press enter. C:\ in this case is the root directory, while e: is the destination drive. This implies that command driven interface is tedious to use as one must follow the exact syntax and path in order to get results, which may be the reason why it is widely used by programmers and other IT specialists, who are well conversant with the commands (Gookin 2004). The graphical user interface as opposed to command line interface uses images, which are event driven. This means that once the user clicks on the image, a predetermined action is triggered and as such, click ing becomes a command executor in contrary to CLI where one had to type a specific command on a command prompt (Anderson 2001). However, it is important to note that GUI enables the user to use both the keyboard and the mouse to execute commands. Images in this context are for example; radio buttons, windows, icons, menus among others, which are designed in a