This is a very good lecture from 1987 by Alan Kay... who was centrally important in developing the first graphical apple macintosh computer - which was the dawn of "windows" based computers. Here, he discusses a bit of history, and also describes the research that went into the idea for providing a mouse and a series of open windows on the screen.

One of the most fascinating things to me, was that it was research with how children wanted to use computers, that led to the development of that graphic layout.