Reading some literature for my course, I’ve run into something I’ve seen/heard a number of times:
Some people pronounce ‘GUI’ as ‘gooey’ goo-ee, etc,
and others spell the letters out, G-U-I
gooey sounds retarded, but it’s apparently the standard…
I don’t know what GUI means but I agree.
same.
Graphic User Interface. Took about 2 minutes on wiki…
Graphical User Interface?
Oh, kids…
I started to use computer with BUI (binary user interface, meaning flipping a switch for each bit you want to enter and reading binary output from LEDs. I just made it up). 
Examples:
Oh, I found better example:
And 4K memory board I had was a bit like this:
But how did you know when you asked someone for a BUI that they wouldn’t bring you a large floatation object?
I was nerd enough to chuckle at that audibly.
BUI didn’t give me any floating feeling, though…
It was a pure pain to enter the starting memory address and then data, byte by byte.
Reading part wasn’t so bad, and I got used to enter data quickly, too.
Still, it never felt good. Boo for BUI.
I have a quick question, how many (millions?) of years would it take to “BUI” five minutes of everday interaction with a computer? That is assuming that the technology was current just the input/output was still BUI.
I have no idea.
Entering a byte (8 bit) took me 1 to 3 seconds on average (because I had to change only one or two bits, sometime).
And Windows (or linux, etc) boots up within a minute or two.
Just to input the boot loader, it would be very very long.
Usually, we only had to enter small monitor program (similar to OS, but very very simple), and it would allow us to use Hexadecimal keyboard or load programs from tape recorder (or paper tapes, teletype, etc).
It took five ten minutes, entering and then checking to enter monitor program.
Once the monitor program is well debugged, we could burn it in UV or EE PROM (or keep it in magnetic core memory, if so equipped) to avoid the painful process.
People who used bigger computer had already HDD and tape drive and punch card, etc.
So, they didn’t have to use BUI.
HDD was huge. More than a foot in diameter. 
Floppy didn’t exist, yet.
Lol, just imagine the simple interaction of reading a post on the internet. You’d get a bunch of 1s and 0s that you’d have to translate into text (html) and then you’d have to sort the html out to figure out who was saying what. Each letter alone would take minimum 10 seconds, probably more, to decode.
And that’s assuming you’d already spent the last decade actually figuring out how to connect to the internet and input the web address…
Could you use the computers with BUI as calculators, or a better question would be, what else could they do?
Of course you could use them as calculators, that’s probably their most useful function.
Theoretically you could do anything you can do with a normal computer…theoretically.
Just like theoretically I could make a high-resolution picture of you with nothing but grains of sand, placed one at a time.
I wanted to use for home control, like x-10 system.
Even with 4K memory, you can do lots of things.
And once monitor is fixed and in PROM, the role of BUI is over, because we can use other method of program/data input.
So, it’s not that bad.
But this is partly why I still try to write small code.
Probably, the pain of BUI has traumatized me.
I never went far with programming because I am or at least was a perfectionist. The idea of programming something on a programming language twenty layers removed from the machine code was very unpleasant. Working with a BUI doesn’t sound like fun, but I’d rather start with that and work my way up until I know what’s actually going on with the modern programs. Of course, a near impossible goal, but that’s why, among other reasons, I’m not studying programing.
I see. I’m very glad that I did what I did.
I was just playing and fooling around when I did it.
But these days, it’s incredibly useful.
And programming is so easy with language like Python and nice development environment.
Learning assembler isn’t so hard (to know how it works).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language
But writing useful program can be tedious.
Reading and understanding what others (or even oneself) have written can be a nightmare.