You know 80s cyberpunk movies where hackers sit in front of black screens all day, typing furiously until they

• solve the problem.
• avoid thermonuclear meltdown.
• find love along the way.

That isn't just Hollywood adding mystery to technology (well, mostly); computers used to only have those black screens with green text. To do anything, you know a whole slew of operating system commands. Data wasn’t even formatted, making reading all the information a computer could give difficult for a person to read and interpret. Then came the graphics revolution.

A GUI (pronounced "gooey," just like the perfect cinnamon roll) keeps you from staring at a black screen with green text all day. The Graphical User Interface allows a computer program to take input from a user in through images on the screen instead of written commands. Any time you use anything on your computer that isn't the terminal, you're using GUI images, buttons, and animations. Things like

• buttons
• dropdown menus
• mouse navigation
• finder or explorer windows
• windows in general

all count as GUIs.

Thanks to GUIs, computers no longer belong to the Hollywood hackers. Pretty much anyone can interact with them without needing a dictionary of all the terminal commands.

You can thank it later.