8

CHAPTER

we’ve used simplified screen input and output to simulate
the old-fashioned printer and keyboard interface of early computers.
From your use of computers, you’re probably more familiar with the mod-
ern graphical user interface (GUI) based on windows. Although the GUI
makes it much easier for people to use programs, it requires more work
on the part of the programmer. Many older programming languages lack
specific support for GUI programming and rely primarily on the style of
I/O that we introduced in Chapter 2. But because Java was developed af-
ter the GUI became the standard mechanism for interactive input and out-
put, it includes built-in features that simplify the programming of a user
interface.
Java provides many different types of windows and interface com-
ponents. In fact, entire books have been written just to explain all of the
user interface features that Java supports. In this text, we use a very sim-
ple but adequate subset of Java’s capabilities.

Until now,

1970

The mobile robot

Shakey uses

artificial intelligence

in its navigation

1970

Dennis Ritchie and

Kenneth Thompson

at Bell Labs develop

the UNIX operating

system for which

they later received

the U.S. National

Medal of Technology

1970

IBM introduces the

8 inch floppy disk

1971

A team at Intel

creates the first

microprocessor, the

Intel 4004

1971

Ray Tomlinson uses

the @ sign, and

sends the first

electronic-mail

message through

ARPANET

1971

The programming

language Pascal is

developed by

Niklaus Wirth