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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

121–130 of 241 posts

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#121

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 :/

Speak for yourself, i use GNU/Linux everywhere, even on the PHB-supplied Apple notebook. You can pry my comforting illusion of freedom from my cold, dead hands!¹

:)

1. I refer to the multitude of binary blobs required to make anything work these days. Lamentable.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#122

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. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why…

"Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why we were advised that we should save our work often because the whole thing was so damn unreliable."

This is all true, but those are problems with the OS, not the UI. The OS was terrible. The UI (NT4/XP/w2k) was pretty decent.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#123
post #58

Hey, the PHP creator included a selfie! (Full disclosure: I write PHP on a daily basis, and reject the opinion that it should be avoided for various reasons, but I recognise the stereotype (that it's not a very 'good' language) enough to derive humour from it - consider it sort of self-deprecating)

In all fairness, it's what I switched from VB to. My current position is that HHVM's existence means that PHP is a serious contender and kicking it out the window is probably not the greatest of ideas. The fact that it doesn't have good console interaction support out of the box kind of killed it for me though. Once my computer setup's stable (this 1024x768 laptop screen isn't that great for dev work :p) I'm going to…

Friends don't let friends use PHP.

> since it's so widespread if I want a small script that'll almost certainly run "in most places" I'm likely to turn to PHP

I'm curious about this though—isn't sh literally required by the POSIX standard? How is PHP more ubiquitous than sh? I certainly don't have PHP installed.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#124
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was probably the cheapest way to get a terminal to unix running at the time. I've been in lots of shops where the given computer is Windows, because that's what the rest of the company runs, and most of my time is spent in terminal windows to unix (Unix long ago, Linux these days). I recall trying to get actual unix on a PC, back around '94 or '95. I actually contacted the local Sun rep, and it was cumbersome and exp…

Wouldn't Linux or BSD have been available? These screenshots are from 2002, not 1992.

And we're still issued Windows computers, locked down by IT, in 2015. Ritchie's desktop was from home, but it still could have been the path of least resistance in his family. Or maybe liked Windows, or gaming, or Quicken, ...

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#125
post #63
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was probably the cheapest way to get a terminal to unix running at the time. I've been in lots of shops where the given computer is Windows, because that's what the rest of the company runs, and most of my time is spent in terminal windows to unix (Unix long ago, Linux these days). I recall trying to get actual unix on a PC, back around '94 or '95. I actually contacted the local Sun rep, and it was cumbersome and exp…

ugh. hummingbird. don't remind me.

Oh god now that was a memory I had long repressed. Just wanted to thank you in advance for my nightmares tonight ;)

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#127
post #78
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it was W2K. It has the stability of NT series better usability, drivers and it was quite fast. Windows XP made simple things a lot harder and slower :)

Yep. Win 2k will always hold a place in my heart. My family bought a computer that came with Windows ME, and of course it crashed constantly. After getting incredibly frustrated with this my friend had a copy of this bizarre OS called Windows 2000. It took a long time to get all the drivers for everything initially, but it was stable. Damn stable. I honestly had a server running Windows 2000 untill about 4 years ago.…

I remember having competitions with classmates and such with several hundred days of uptime on Win2k :). We were rather chuffed with ourselves at the time. Those were the days.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#128
post #41

The most surprising thing about these is the stark reminder of Microsoft's dominance during this era. Whether it's the terminal emulator running on NT4 or Internet Explorer being the only sensible browser on a Mac, Microsoft has fallen far with this crowd.

Very true. They succeeded in getting a desktop into most homes. Staying fashionable is more difficult.

[deleted]

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#130
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.

It was at least partly due to Apple claiming ownership of overlapping windows.
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