Eugene Mosher

Eugene Mosher
'Gene' Mosher
Born	January 13, 1949 Watertown, New York
Nationality	United States
Education	State University of New York at Buffalo, 1972
Children	Kelley, Corey, Brittany, Kasey, Nicholas
Work
Engineering discipline	Touchscreen Interfaces for Point of Sale Software
Significant projects	Invented the graphic touchscreen point of sale computer and interface

Gene Mosher (born January 13, 1949 in Watertown, New York) is best known for inventing the graphic touchscreen point of sale computer and is a pioneer of human-computer interaction, including touchscreen interfaces, application-specific GUIs, direct manipulation GUIs, widget toolkits, widget engines and network computing.

Mosher is a 1966 graduate of Xaverius College in Borgerhout, Belgium and received a Bachelor's degree in Social Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in 1972. As a restaurant builder/owner/operator from 1972 until 1984, Mosher first began writing point of sale software on his vintage Apple II computer in 1977 and pioneered point of sale software for the food and beverage vertical market to make practical the use of a PC as an order entry device (1978) and the printer as a way to communicate orders to the preparation areas of restaurants, namely kitchens and bars (1979). Mosher sold his restaurant business in 1984. He relocated from Syracuse, New York to Eugene, Oregon, where he began work on the first graphic touchscreen user interfaces and the first point of sale computer, using the bit-mapped graphical display and unified memory features of the newly-released Atari ST.

Mosher developed ViewTouch, the first virtual graphic user interface (GUI) and widget toolkit featuring touchscreen input. He created the first 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 pioneered 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.

Gene Mosher never applied for any patents or received any royalties for his pioneering innovations. The large body of GUI accomplishments credited to him since 1985 has formed a substantial basis of prior art, placing many aspects of GUI development above the restrictions of patents that would otherwise have the effect of impeding the free and rapid development of GUIs.

Mosher remains active working from his home office in Eugene, Oregon, using his ViewTouch trademark to assist point of sale software developers worldwide and to promote philanthropic activities related to his professional interests.

External links

• Gene Mosher Turns Up The Heat On POS (Nancy Cohen, Open, 29 March 2004)
• Waiters at a Eugene grill will use wireless ViewTouch tablets to take your order (Sherri Buri McDonald The Register-Guard February 6, 2004)
• POS device eliminates PC servers, databases (Mike Magee, The Inquirer 7 August 2007)
• Local native took part in retail revolution (Rachael Hanley, Watertown Daily times, 15 August 2007)
• Direct manipulation in point of sale graphic interfaces (hcik4, Human Computer Interaction, 1 November 2008)
• ViewTouch