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GUI (pronounced GOO-ee) is a acromyn that stands for Graphical User Interface.  A GUI  is a graphical interface that allows the user a comfortable visual interface with a computer. If you are reading this text on a computer monitor, you are looking at a GUI.

The first computer user interfaces were mainly text-and-keyboard oriented commands. The DOS operating system is the most recognized type of this interface.  Today all major computer operating systems provide a graphical user interface. 

To increase the familiarity of a user with the GUI, the GUI uses metaphors for objects familiar in real life, such as the desktop or viewing information through a window. Elements of a GUI include windows, pull-down menus, buttons, scroll bars, iconic images, wizards and the mouse. In recent years, multimedia elements of sound, voice, motion video, and virtual reality have become part of the GUI.

The GUI familiar to most of us today in either the Mac or the Windows operating systems.  The first GUI originated at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratory in the late 1970s.  Apple used it in their first Macintosh computers. Later, Microsoft used many of the same ideas in their first version of the Windows operating system for IBM-compatible PCs.