Design Principles and Practices’s Updates

How The Close Button Was Born

fastcodesign.com | Article Link | by John Brownlee

If you were to name a single button you interact with most often, it would probably be the close button, whether you're on Windows, Linux, or Mac. The close button lets you exit a program or window with a single click. So when Xerox created the world's first graphical user interface-based operating system, "close" has to be the button they came up with first, right?

Wrong. As students of early computing history know, it was the hamburger button, that triple-tiered catch-all button that designers love to hate. But the close button came next, right? Nope. In fact, it wasn't until Windows 95 that the close button existed at all.

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