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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

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Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#101

Post by mordocai »

szastupov wrote: post #80
IgorPartola wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where I got started using Linux. Oh the memories. I even have some of my (terrible) screenshots on there and had submitted a bunch of news articles and hundreds of comments. Now I don't even remember my username.

Oh the memories of nights spent downloading sources on Dial-Up and nights compiling them on Gentoo. Back then we all had hope for the bright future for Linux on desktop, but it never made it, now we are all on OSX :/

To be fair, I use Debian at work and gentoo on both my personal boxes. So not all of us are on OS X (though my work laptop is a macbook since I didn't get a choice).

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#102

Post by idid »

weland wrote: post #16
72deluxe wrote: post #12

I really liked these. This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 beca…

> This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. They also look like someone tried to come up with their own ideas. Everything today is flat, sketchy, inexpressive and boring. > How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is reall…

That last phrase is really quotable! Agreed.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#103

Post by 72deluxe »

wlesieutre wrote: post #81
72deluxe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite miss the brushed metal look. It is interesting that you could take OSX from back then and put it in front of someone today and it'll behave mostly the same. Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments (GNOME3, Unity etc.) or Windows 8/10. Windows 10 you can to some extent. Thought provoking.

I don't miss brushed metal in general because they started putting it in too many places. The early concept was that it fit programs that mimicked hardware devices, and iTunes was saying "Look at me, I'm your stereo system." Then Panther (10.3) came along, and Finder went "Look at me, I'm your filing cabinet!" Eeeeeh, ok I guess? That's when it started to feel tacky and overused for me. Maybe because I only ever had…

Ah yes brushed metal everywhere was bad. As you say, it made sense in iTunes as it looked like a hifi.

It really does do too much these days. It handles backups for your phone, your iPad, plays videos, plays music, handles playlists, acts as a shop etc. etc. etc.

Combined with the fact that buttons on iOS no longer look like buttons and text and hints are being replaced by cryptic symbols, and everything is flat so you don't know what is text and what responds to behaviour, I think user interaction has suffered and things aren't as discoverable as they once were, in general. Not just iTunes.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#104

Post by bmn_ »

joosters wrote: post #26
longwave wrote: post #18

Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one. Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

I've tried it a few times, but it's just so painful when you want things to align. Now, if you had a really good code layout tool that could 'snap' parts of lines so that they horizontally align at sensible places, I think non-monospace fonts could be useful. In fact, having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. I work in emacs and it's frustrating when the editor decides to 'fix' your own spacing…

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#105

Post by Xophmeister »

pivo wrote: post #44
hankmander wrote: post #14

The tiling window manager wasn't invented yet? All of these screenshots look like floating window hell. Thank god we live in the future!

The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)

Wasn't that just a technological workaround, though? The hardware couldn't support overlapping windows.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#106

Post by rograndom »

currysausage wrote: post #36

"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I like things to work fast, not be bogged down with decompressing music, etc." (Jon Hall)

I remember when I had a ~100mhz Cyrix 4/586 clone that I used to do desktop publishing (Photoshop, Quark, etc) in the mid-late 1990s. Plenty fast for that, but it could on play 128kbps MP3s if nothing else was running. I would have a tape deck hooked up to to the audio out so I could make cassette tapes for my car from MP3s.

That got replaced with a actual 166mhz Pentium MMX. That one had no problem playing MP3s along with the regular work. Same with the next machine that was a Celeron overclocked to 400mhz.

I could only imagine how I would waste dual 500mhz processors at that time!

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#107

Post by ToastyMallows »

vbezhenar wrote: post #60
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

I still think that Windows NT 4 was the best Windows OS ever. And may be the best GUI ever. I always switch to classic theme, if I have to use Windows. In last versions it's not very classic, though.

Someone told me that the classic theme went away in window 8/8.1/10, made me kind of sad because I too always changed to the classic theme.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#108

Post by etrain »

lottin wrote: post #84

That was before we had Firefox, when the only graphical web browser available in most Linux distros was Netscape, which was barely usable. Also most fonts were bitmap fonts, not the nice scalable fonts of today.

The Mozilla Suite existed and wasn't that bad, even in 99/00 when I started using Linux. Konqueror was also pretty decent. The web also wasn't as central to the Internet experience then (irc, pop3 clients, and so on were pretty prevalent.) Most of my time in a web browser was spent checking slashdot, googling for things, and so on.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#109

Post by apk17 »

Xophmeister wrote: post #105
pivo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)

Wasn't that just a technological workaround, though? The hardware couldn't support overlapping windows.

Back then the (usual) hardware didn't support anything; the Xserver just wrote into some 100KByte of video memory, one bit per pixel. The X server had to deal with overlapping, and could.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#110

Post by LesZedCB »

foldor wrote: post #93
[deleted] wrote: post #91

[deleted]

I believe you have replied to the wrong news post. Were you referring to the one about uBlock Origin being denied on the Chrome Web Store by chance?

oops, yeah. something weird happened with the tabs I guess. thanks for pointing that out!
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