I'd love to see this sort of design history, but for old terminal/text-mode GUIs (TUIs?). I'm too young to have experienced it outside of the odd DOS cash desk at a grocery store. Does any book/website exist about these? VT220 library systems etc...
Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.
