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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

#221

Post by radlad »

efdee wrote: post #219
ant6n wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the 'huge strides'. I feel nowadays with 'flat design' (is that the right term?) I don't know where I can click and what actions will be performed. It's like the UI is a bunch of text labels, but they may actually be links, but they may actually perform an action. Although there's no way to know, since the label doesn't say what action is performed, and since we don't have mice anymore, we don't ha…

> Which of these are clickable? All of them > Which will result in the phone making a call In the calling screen, each one. In the contacts screen, none. > and which will result into going into looking at the contact? In the calling screen, the three dots. In the contacts screen, each one. > How do I send an SMS rather than a call? Click the text balloon icon (in the detail view) > How do I edit it? Click the edit ic…

> Have you actually used the thing you're complaining about?

But see, that's exactly the problem. In your answer to his comment (to which he asked plenty of questions almost facetiously to prove a point), you showed off all the inconsistencies. The actions taken by the symbols are different depending on the context.

Why? I should know what clicking will do BEFORE I do it. I shouldn't have to have used it before.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#222

Post by zerr »

bluedino wrote: post #188
zerr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on those screenshots, but C++ creator Stroustrup is also a Windows user.

For some reason every picture I've seen of his office, he's parked in front of a Sun of some sort.

I believe at that time, for the office, he didn't have much choice :)

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#223

Post by crucini »

mangecoeur wrote: post #45
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…

> 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…

Interface design has certainly taken huge strides, but I don't think they're in a good direction. UIs are increasingly trying to be "pretty", which is in the eye of the beholder, but not useful.

I think most of the UI on the Mac is really pretty and tasteful with it's low-key grayscale icons, but not very functional. The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words. I have to use iTunes to put (lots of) files on an iPhone, and it's a ridiculous chore involving lots of clicks and dismissing pointless dialog boxes.

As the population gets better at navigating UIs, UIs have become increasingly silly and even perverse to compensate. (Or rather, because they can.) XCode, for instance, has some ridiculously hidden features. Without google you could never get the thing to work.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#224

Post by jordanlev »

i336_ wrote: post #58
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #29

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…

Yeah, it seems that most of the anti-PHP bias is from programmers building things that they deploy themselves. But for sites that are built by non-programmers (e.g. web designers... there are a ton out there building CMS-based sites, they dabble in programming but don't get too deep), the fact that it easily deploys on most shared hosts can't be beat.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#225

Post by [deleted] »

Fkidsthesedays wrote: post #189
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.

If you ask really serious .. I dont think any serious developer gives a shit about font being used . Back in the days people used to be happy even to see a character on screen . These days js script writer using bower and other similar things and calling it automation will never understand that. The rush or high of using sun , bare bone x11 linux , developing without any autocomplete , when your experience was your s…

[deleted]

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#226

Post by crucini »

mangecoeur wrote: post #150
dingaling wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? Compared to aluminium-gray-and-no-blue OS X? I don't think mainstream UIs have much to boast about in terms of the evolution of colour palettes.

There's a lot of subtlety in choosing colours and feels, not all greys are the same. I mean think of how many premium devices come in grey aluminium finish - there's lots and they look great. No one has ever made a "concrete finish" device, because that would be horrible. Likewise, you can't put OSX and win95 next to each other and say "they're both grey, therefore they are basically the same" because that's obviousl…

> No one has ever made a "concrete finish" device,

Most hand-held plastic devices of the 80s/90s were hair-cell finish, emulating the texture of leather. Engineers knew that smooth plastic will scratch and show scratches. Also the hair-cell feels better to hold.

Think of a Motorola pager for instance.

Hair-cell is kind of a micro-concrete.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#227

Post by aembleton »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #196

Really enjoyed this. I hate to say it but I get more sentimental looking at these than I do most family pictures. The old Netscape logo really hit me hard. One reason I am now going to start screenshting things from now on and archiving them :)

I had the same sentimental pang. I've just spent the last hour going through old files trying to find an old screen grab. Found this [1], but it was probably more about me trying to show how shiny and clean my desktop was at the time so I didn't have any windows open.

But, it shows the Mozilla logo before I finally moved to Firefox. I think this would have been around 2001 or 2002. I don't know how I was so happy with a 640x480 screen.

1. http://i.imgur.com/zK73D36.jpg

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#228

Post by i336_ »

toothbrush wrote: post #123
i336_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good point.

A "small script" might not necessarily be very simple - it might only have 5-10 lines, but those lines might involve parsing HTML, connecting to a remote host somewhere, running a one-time listening server, nontrivially processing a set of files... any number of different tasks.

sh is good for job execution, piping and redirection, and task management, and it launches processes like sed, grep, and awk to handle text processing. Beyond that, simple, one-time HTML parsing can be done with sed and grep, but it doesn't work very well (and I'd never use it in production), I can't really easily connect to a server without netcat or socat (or, in a pinch, bash's exec operator, which is slow in practice - I wrote an IRC bot in bash, its CPU usage skyrocketed easily), or for more complex tasks involving HTTP requests, curl or wget.

It's ultimately impossible to know whether someone has Python, Perl, Tcl, Haskell, Ruby, Node.js, or even PHP installed, and able to run console scripts... but only a language like one of these comes with a base library competent enough to include functionality to achieve all the goals I noted above.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#229

Post by emidln »

lordnacho wrote: post #175

Do people these days even have a "my desktop"? My work is a whole bunch of VM screens, accessible from anywhere. Also they are all a mix of OSes...

I have a command launch that pops up when I hit the windows key and a gnome-terminal, chrome, and slack open that I can alt-tab through. These are always full screen. I think my background is purplish.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#230

Post by lholden »

I can understand how Stallman felt... To an extent. Through the early 90s (92 and 93)... I avoided X. Didn't see a reason for it... As I had everything I needed on the console. Then again... I had to downgrade my ram from 8 megs to 4 when switched to my 486. Booting up X and its associated apps kinda stressed my memory.

By 2002 I was certainly running a graphical desktop. Can't say I remember which. Never really got into Windows outside of gaming. I was most likely using Windowmaker.

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