Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

In Windows it is a bit odd anyway, as anything drawn using GDI or GDI+ goes through the CPU. This includes the "classic" interface. For accelerated interfaces (Aero), the GPU is involved (but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?), so on rubbish GPUs it may be slower than going through the CPU, perhaps? Windows should tell you that your computer is rubbish so won't attempt to use the Aero interface.

If you elect to not use the Aero interface, it'll then attempt to mimic the Aero interface entirely in software using GDI+. This is indeed far slower, as the command to draw a series of lines and bevels obviously means more CPU calls than a single "draw grey rectangle" command. The interface is not drawn using precached bitmaps, but is done by software commands. More complicated drawing = more CPU = slower

Windows gives the option to turn off effects like shadows and transparency, window contents whilst dragging etc. in "performance" options in Control Panel, as these would mean more CPU calls (there's more drawing going on). If it wasn't faster, why would it be under "performance"?

But as you state, to a human perceptible degree it may not be noticed. I find that opening Windows Explorer on Windows XP is a far faster drawing experience than opening it on Windows 7, where it needs to fade into view and then redraw the tree on the left, the pane on the right, the toolbar with gradients (gradients are not free!), the "places" tree above the tree on the left (how confusing), and the giant blue panel that sits at the bottom to draw a picture of a computer in addition to the status bar.

File Manager on Windows 3.1 was really fast by comparison.

EDIT: Actually, on OSX I am left with "whitewashed concrete grey" with "primary pre-school colour" red orange and green. Full circle really!

>Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?

At least it was easy to read. Nowadays I often can't really focus on UIs because of lacking contrasts.

While now everything looks more "nice" the usability (as in how easy it is for the eyes to focus/find something) often is worse than it was some time ago.

FWIW, I swore I was looking at Win98, and was surprised to learn (it's on the page, straight from Dennis Richie himself) that that's actually WinNT4. I would never have guessed.

I plan to get my 486SX put back together; here's hoping it works. It has 8MB of RAM. (And an SB16... and a radio card... and I recently came upon an ISA ethernet card which hopefully works.....) :D

I remember the first time I enabled Web view in '98 and discovered View Source in my desktop menu. I closed Notepad very quickly. lol

I'm looking forward to building CDE and running it, FWIW. Hopefully I can get it working on something appropriately old! :P

BeOS et. al. FTW. I hope to seriously play around with it sometime soon.

The reason I commented was because I've historically had terrible hardware too :P but it's made me realize how much old/unoptimized/inefficient hardware is so badly needed by developers today... new computers are like new cars, strong, silent types, not like the old noisy tech of old where you could get a visceral idea of what you were doing by sensing the system lag - like on my old 800MHz Duron I was using earlier this year, the mouse cursor could lag four different ways and I knew what each one meant (disk I/O, swapping to death, CPU usage by one process, or CPU usage by many processes). On this note, Netflix' new internal Flux monitoring system is interesting, it provides an "unconscious-compatible" view of data in the same vein.

And yeah, I saw the Netscape screenshots. The scrollbars look really cool IMO.

You might like to look into http://xpra.org, it's sort of VNC + "wow". :P

What else is there...

You might like to have a look at http://vmwaros.blogspot.com

Haxial KDX might be a fun (pointless :P) thing to chase...

Hm, I can't think of anything else. The x86 assembler in bash that was on here last fortnight comes to mind, but nothing else is coming to mind right now...

Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.

How this is true. My brother had an Elonex Pentium 120Mhz laptop, and that was truly brought to its knees when playing an MP3.

Playing mods and xms was alright, unless they were complicated. Encoding MP3s was another thing altogether - I was wowed when a schoolmate had a dual CPU machine that ENCODED faster than it ripped CDs. I could only dream of such a thing - encoding was far far far slower than reading the data from the CD in the first place.