The xterm terminal emulator of the X Window System had a feature where it would show the automatically generated contents of the screen in a 1x2 font (a representation) when it was turned iconic . This dates to 1986 (or before)..

Picons are icons that are used to represent persons and other entities. From 1990?

In a system for file managing image data of an electronic camera, so long as the image data is recorded by the same image pickup apparatus, a peculiar file name which is not overlapped is generated and in order to prevent that a plurality of files of the same name exist, when an electronic camera is connected to a main body of a computer, a storage device in the electronic camera is examined from a host application of the computer, and when a file of a file name including numerical values exceeding a predetermined value is found, a message is displayed for the user in a manner such that after all of the files having the file names which had automatically been formed were transferred to the computer, all of the contents in the storage device are deleted or formatted. When the detachable storage device is loaded or a power source is turned on, if the file having the unique file name which was automatically generated does not exist in the storage device, the numerical values held in the electronic camera are initialized.

A graphical user interface for a computer system that includes a memory for storing application programs and application files. The user interface permits the user to initiate execution of a selected application program, and produces a snapshot that graphically represents a screen produced during the execution of the application program. The snapshot may be displayed after execution of the application program is terminated, and provides a visual reference for the application file that was opened when the snapshot was taken. Snapshots and their corresponding application files may be organized in a project format, and new documents opened by an application program may be automatically placed in the opened project. An improved technique for initiating the execution of application programs is also described.

A method and apparatus for providing an optimized page-based electronic document file and downloading the optimized file. An optimized document file is created from a non-optimized electronic document. Page contents are contiguously written in the optimized file and a page offset table is provided in the optimized file that includes page offset information used to locate individual pages and objects of the document. Shared objects, such as fonts, are included in the file after the page contents. When downloading the optimized file from a host, the page offset information is read early and is used to download a specific page requested by the user without downloading other pages in the document. A viewer preferably downloads a first portion of the requested page, while all remaining portions of the requested page are located and requested by a finder process using the page offset table. The requested page can thus be downloaded with only one connection to the host. Shared objects can be downloaded interleaved between portions of the page contents that reference the shared objects. The requested page is displayed to the user on an output display device.

A source file editing apparatus accomplishes various concatenation editing by displaying source files, especially image files, as thumbnails and controlling the thumbnails using an intuitive process. A reader reads a path from a starting point to an ending point of a drag-and-drop operation. A display processor respectively displays on a screen a plurality of thumbnails corresponding to each of a plurality of source files including image data and/or voice data. The display processor moves a first thumbnail corresponding to the starting point of the drag-and-drop operation read by the reader to an ending point of the drag-and-drop operation. A file editor detects how the first thumbnail moved and displayed by the display processor and a second thumbnail displayed on the screen are overlapping each other. The file editor executes preset concatenation editing to the source files corresponding to each of the two thumbnails depending on how the thumbnails are overlapping each other. Source files can be edited in a manner in which the source files are continuously played.

A method and apparatus for displaying information descriptive of the contents or intended use of a file. For Graphical User Interfaces on a computer monitor, abbreviated data for the file is displayed in a window opened adjacent to the file icon. The abbreviated data in this window describes the contents of the file. The display window containing the abbreviated data is placed so as to indicate the file to which it is attached and that it describes. Text, graphical, and other types of data can be displayed.

A computer-based electronic document and/or paper-based document management application program. The program provides an efficient way to automatically import, index, categorize, store, search, retrieve, manipulate and archive electronic documents. The program is also capable of managing documents regardless of document type or document format.

These multimedia data are extracted using a Web mirroring package. From this extracted data, COIR creates the picture indices, thumbnail files for browsing and tables to refer the original data location (URL) automatically [See 4.1]. . . In this case, video data and thumbnail images of each key frame which are created automatically by COIR are displayed.

In other related work, many desktop publishing systems provide tiny “thumbnail sketches” of images that are stored on disk. To open an image file the user simply points to these miniature images instead of specifying a file name.

Anticipates applications representing documents with thumbnails.

The objects-movie segments-are displayed either as thumbnails or in table form. The tables can be sorted by column. Higher-level segments are represented by folder icons, lower-level segments are symbolized as film strips. Users can double-click on them to go down by one level within the hierarchy or to open the movie player for a segment. Anticipates using thumbnails to represent files. Anticipates opening an application, such as the movie player, when the user selects the thumbnail.

Thumbnails. An array of thumbnail images (as shown in the Similar To pane of Figure 6). Thumbnails (as opposed to icons) can recapture many of the visual cues of paper documents and can support rapid visual recognition and sometimes directly provide the information sought. Anticipates thumbnails.