Interface Builder was invented by Jean-Marie Hullot (1954–2019), a French researcher at INRIA, who built its predecessor — SOS Interface — in Lisp around 1984–85. He left INRIA, productized it as Interface Builder, and demoed it at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in January 1987.
Denison Bollay took Hullot to NeXT after MacWorld. Steve Jobs saw the demonstration and was aggressive. Hullot was unimpressed. When he got to his car, a NeXT representative was waiting to bring him back. Jobs took him for a walk. He was recruited.
By 1988, Interface Builder shipped with NeXTSTEP 0.8 — the first commercial application allowing interface objects to be placed using a mouse. No code written. No code generated. The NIB file archived the objects themselves — "freeze-dried" — ready to thaw at runtime.
In the autumn of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee opened Interface Builder on a NeXT workstation at CERN. He dragged windows and menus onto canvases, wired connections, saved NIB files. The result was WorldWideWeb — the first web browser-and-editor. See CART 014 · WWW for the room it became.
The dream is older. Vannevar Bush, in The Atlantic, July 1945, imagined the Memex — a desk that browsed and edited a linked corpus, decades before any of this hardware existed. Hear it read aloud at CANON · track 02. Dreamweaver in 1997 was still trying to get the editing back.
Interface Builder — Jean-Marie Hullot's invention. The tool that built the tool that built the web. Shipped with NeXTSTEP 0.8 in October 1988, on the day the NeXT Cube was unveiled. Tim Berners-Lee used it at CERN in late 1990 to build WorldWideWeb — see CART 014.
Drag controls from the Palette onto the Canvas. Select them. Edit attributes in the Inspector. Wire connections between objects using the ◎ button in the Connections tab. Then Test → Simulate Interface.
No code written. No code generated. The NIB file is the interface — freeze-dried, ready to thaw.
The headwater is older than NeXT. Hear Vannevar Bush read aloud on As We May Think, 1945, at CANON track 02 — the essay that imagined the desk that browsed and edited a linked corpus.
CART 015 / 019 · MAGNESIUM · FROM HULLOT · NEXTSTEP · 1988
FROM THE LITERATURE
The constraint solver in Hullot's SOS Interface descends from Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis. Hear the source papers read aloud in CANON · 001B:
→ track 03 · Sutherland · Sketchpad · 1963
→ track 02 · Bush · As We May Think · 1945