Eugene Mosher

Gene Mosher invented the graphic touchscreen point of sale computer, working in the field of human-computer interaction, including touchscreen interfaces, application-specific GUIs, direct manipulation GUIs, widget toolkits, widget engines and network computing.
Mosher was born in 1949 in Watertown, New York and grew up in Philadelphia. He received a bachelor's degree from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. There he began work on his first graphic touchscreen user interfaces and his first point of sale computer, using the bit-mapped graphical display and unified memory features of the newly-released Atari ST.
Mosher developed ViewTouch, a virtual graphic user interface (GUI) and widget toolkit featuring touchscreen input. He created a fully widget driven graphical point of sale application software featuring touchscreen input. The ViewTouch GUI was a very early widget engine, an array of touchscreen-driven widgets which comprised a complete, stand-alone, application specific GUI. The effect of the achievement was the creation and implementation of the paradigm that was to become the basis for the retail vertical market software industry itself.
Mosher also developed the widget toolkit as an application framework for the rapid development of any kind of application-specific virtual interface with a touchscreen GUI. The practical effect of this was that software programmers no longer needed to control or even develop the graphical user interfaces that customers would be using because the users themselves were given tools with which to develop their own widget-based GUIs.
His later work used the X Window System and the Secure Shell networking protocol to build a secure framework for software applications enabling large collaborative work groups across the Internet, a precursor of cloud computing.

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