Xerox Star

Xerox developed the modern WYSIWYG interface far earlier than the Macintosh's insanley great UI. The Xerox star held modern looking 72 x 72 icons and developed many of the standards that appear today, from document appearances to icons that change in appearance. The Xerox star graphical user interface and corrresponding icons heavily influenced the way each subsequent user interace has appeared today.

After the enormous success of the Apple II, and the utter failure of the Lisa, Apple followed up with the Macintosh. The Macintosh desktop icons were based heavily on the Lisa, but were more streamlined and held a 32 x 32 pixel footprint that became commonplace in the PC industry for years (Again, heavily based on the Xerox Star). The monochrome icons were designed by Susan Kare (who later went on to design the icons for Windows 3.0). The document icons were similar to those from the Xerox, while applications relied heavily on the diamond shape. These icons were the building blocks of each Macintosh system software that followed, but were ultimately userped by the new style of Mac OS X icons.