Several years back I was watching Independence Day, a fairly decent movie about aliens invading earth. It was an enjoyable film with some pretty neat special effects, except my suspension of disbelief broke down when Jeff Goldblum decided he would infect an alien spaceship's computer defense system with a software virus. Doing so would deactivate the force field and allow Will Smith to jump into the pilot's seat and sneak back undetected to alien HQ, before loading the virus onto the mother ship and saving the planet. All good so far, except at the key point when Jeff Goldblum reached for his Apple Macintosh, cranked up a command prompt, and proceeded to write some DOS syntax. As what looked suspiciously like the result of a "dir /w" command scrolled rapidly along the command prompt, the alien spaceship threw up its hands in surrender. For me the whole movie was ruined at this point. Curiously I'm not sure why it shouldn't have been so before given the plotline's basis around little green men in dog fights with jet fighters, but the killer blow for me was the sight of a DOS prompt on a Mac.

Hollywood movies seem to have a very odd concept of a user interface, and it's all the more puzzling to me since computers are household items that presumably everyone working on a film has had access to. In earlier movies there wasn't such a ubiquity of PCs in people's homes and offices, so film directors made logon screens with huge fonts while error messages were shown with giant flashing red graphics and klaxon sound effects. Teenagers invariably hacked into any computer from their tree house simply by writing a random password generator and watching it break each digit of the password one by one as they supped on their kiddie soda. This formed the plotline for numerous films, including the 1983 hit War Games, which was made all the more unbelievable by the fact that once the whiz kids had managed to unknowingly start World War III, they averted it by reprogramming the defense department's computer to play tic-tac-toe with itself. You wonder what the IT department who programmed the original software was doing at the time the generals wanted to stop the impending war - perhaps they had all been laid off and the code maintenance outsourced overseas? Even latter day films showing people using e-mail software have 24 point font software with each letter of the incoming mail typing itself character by character.

While it's fun to knock films for failing to do software correctly, there is a purpose to my current diatribe. By continually mystifying and shrouding computers as the realm of the geek and the nerd and creating ridiculous user interfaces, they perpetuate the idea that computers should be hard to use. The syllogism is that if programmers create hard-to-use applications, they are somehow creating a sophisticated piece of software. Nothing could be further from the truth - the GUI is all about simplicity through sophistication.

When I was at university in the 1980s I used an IBM 3084 and a Honeywell computer, both of which were powerful boxes but had no GUI in sight. In my last year I had my first Macintosh and thought, "This is the future," and it pretty much inspired me to enter computing as a profession. I was shocked, however, by the fact that so much business software seemed oblivious to the GUI revolution that was to come, and my early colleagues mocked drag and drop with loaded acronyms like WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, and pull-down menus).

Most of the current GUIs that we use were conceived back in the 1970s at Xerox Parc. This is described excellently in the book Dealers in Lightning, which covers the almost incredulous opposition the early developers encountered by many who were opposed to the GUI as being anything more than research that would never catch on. The other amazing thing for me is that nothing much seems to have come along since the Xerox project. The basic concepts of scrollbars, combo boxes, moveable windows, menus, and everything we use were invented over 30 years ago, and while it's good, it's by no means perfect. Where is the next innovation coming from? It's not from movies that latch onto the latest buzzword and try to cover it in mystique (not too dissimilar from a tech company's marketing department). It could come out of research as the Xerox project did, or perhaps it will come from an entirely new angle. Wherever it comes from, the key to its success will be simplification. The WIMP made the GUI easier to use, not harder, and this should be the driving force behind any piece of interface design. There is no shame in making something easy to use, and hopefully one day soon I'll see a Hollywood movie where the software being used is simple and obvious, and breaks the cliché of an expert operator having to be a boffin or child prodigy. Talking of boffins, next time you hit a browser check out www.moller.com/skycar - it's a flying car. Enjoy.