Online Service Interfaces
The first online service utilized a simple text-based interface in which content was largely text only and users made choices via a command prompt. This allowed just about any computer with a modem and terminal communications program the ability to access these text-based online services. Compuserve would later offer, with the advent of the Apple Macintosh and MS Windows-based PC’s, a GUI interface program for their service. This provided a very rudimentary GUI interface. Compuserve continued to offer text-only access for those needing it. Online services like Prodigy and AOL developed their online service around a GUI and thus unlike CompuServe's early GUI-based software, these online services provided a more robust GUI interface. Early GUI-based online service interfaces offered little in the way of detailed graphics such as photographs or pictures. Largely they were limited to simple icons and buttons and text. As modem speeds increased it became more feasible to offer images and other more complicated graphics to users thus providing a nicer look to their services (John Java).
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—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)