The earliest known implementation of radial pie menus was in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, on a PDP-7 with a round 340 vector display with a light pen, connected over the network to a Titan, one of the first network distributed user interface systems.

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

Films from the University of Cambridge Library Archives:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

It wasn't until I implemented pie menus in PostScript for the NeWS window system in 1988 that they were actually drawn in round windows.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-m...

More:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217923

DonHopkins 87 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu

Thanks for the shout out and links!

That timeline you linked to goes along with this article I wrote a few years ago:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#8546

The earliest known implementation of pie menus was in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector display with a light pen.

Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20...

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

Films from the University of Cambridge Library Archives:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

In 1986 Mike Gallaher and I together came up with the same idea, and I implemented a prototype proof-of-concept for the X10 window system I called "theta menus":

https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/theta-menus/

Mitch Bradley suggested the name "pie menu", and I implemented them in the X10 "uwm" window manager, which I integrated into Mitch's Sun Forth system so it was possible to script the window manager in Forth:

https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/

https://donhopkins.com/home/pub/piemenus/pietest/fuwm-main.f

X10 Pie Menu Window Manager:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog

You could define both pie menus and linear menus in a special menu definition syntax in your .uwmrc file, and configure them to run various window management, application launching, and shell scripting commands. But there was no pie menu editor, just a text file defining the menus.

We performed an experiment to compare the speed and error rate of pie menus and linear menus, which I programmed in Forth to randomize and present the menus and measure the error rates and timing statistics.

Pie Menu Experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0zEUi6p2ws

Implementing a Forth scriptable pie menu window manager for X10 led the way to implementing pie menus in PostScript for various versions of the NeWS window system. It was easy for me to make the transition from Forth to PostScript, which is much more like Lisp than like Forth, and NeWS had an object oriented programming system like Smalltalk which is great for implementing user interface toolkits.

Just the pie menus from All The Widgets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE

Ben Shneiderman demo: Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

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