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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#231

Post by jaredcwhite »

ghostcluster wrote: post #227
jaredcwhite wrote: post #219

Windows 95 and its immediate successors had a lot of problems regarding stability, memory usage, performance in certain cases, etc. That and the comparison with the NT OS line is a separate discussion however. What is important about Windows 95 was the design of the GUI. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. Even though I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon from the very first moment in 2001 and…

The Task Bar and Start Menu metaphors have held up well. At the time on the Mac, it was harder to see an overview of running Applications and windows at a glance.

True. I didn't have much experience with the Mac back in the Mac OS classic era, but that was one thing I found very annoying coming from the Windows side. While it took a while to get the Dock right in OS X, it was a big improvement over the previous Mac UI.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#232

Post by dfox »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #186
blattimwind wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this. (On the flip side, Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage is such an utter piece of garbage that I can't imagine there being any ove…

> Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage It's not the same vintage. It's a carry over from Win 3.0.

It is not.

Windows 3.0 didn't have any standard system dialogs, these were introduced in 3.1, but that is not the main point. In Windows 3.1 the directory selection dialog was exactly the same as file open/save dialog (Figure 8 in the article) but didn't let you to choose files (and there are still places in windows where standard open dialog is used for choosing directory).

What is typically used as "standard directory selection dialog" actually isn't even documented standard WinAPI dialog, but originally internal dialog of the explorer shell (and it would not surprise me it it was not present in original Windows 95 RTM but introduced in some slightly later version), also it does not select directories (ie. pathname as string), but shell folders (ie. ITEMIDLIST).

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#233

Post by guelo »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #219

Windows 95 and its immediate successors had a lot of problems regarding stability, memory usage, performance in certain cases, etc. That and the comparison with the NT OS line is a separate discussion however. What is important about Windows 95 was the design of the GUI. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. Even though I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon from the very first moment in 2001 and…

I disagree that OSX completely beats Windows GUI in all areas. I find Windows' window manager, Explorer and taskbar more usable and capable than the Mac equivalents. Not to mention everything is more configurable, after many years using OSX I still get confused with the unchangeable, low contrast, light-grey on top of light-grey, window theme where you can't tell which window has focus. Also miss on OSX how you can tab over to everything in Windows without having to use your mouse.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#234

Post by dfox »

smoyer wrote: post #52
einr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There absolutely was TCP/IP support in Windows 95 from the very beginning. It was not installed by default but it was trivial to add via the Network applet in Control Panel. SLIP/PPP was also supported and you had basic utilities like Telnet and FTP included so you could connect to the Internet right out of the box. No web browser, though. Internet Explorer 1.0 shipped with the optional Plus! pack.

Since a large part of my work involved building networks of pre-DOCSIS cable modems at the time, I can tell you that the first Windows to support TCP/IP was Windows 3.11 (Windows for WorkGroups). This was carried into Windows 95 and by Windows 98 there was even Internet Explorer.

But in windows 3.11 the TCP stack was not part of the installation or even on the installation media, it had to be installed separately together with win32s. In Windows 95 IIRC everything you needed for TCP/IP was on the installation media.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#235

Post by ksk »

yoz-y wrote: post #89
vadimberman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?

For minimize I can't say. But the maximize works the way it works because (and this is according to the platform ideology, not some general truth) you are not supposed to maximize windows in the Windows sense of the word. The macOS interface is based around floating and overlapping windows. If you put a window over the whole screen then it could be as well maximized. This gets a bit hairy on smaller screens but reall…

What was the big screen they optimized for in 1984?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#236

Post by jandrese »

Momquist wrote: post #211
jandrese wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 95 was no paragon of stability when you started loading it up with tray apps and running big nasty applications or trying to use the damn printer with its piece of shit driver. We are spoiled these days by how stable our computers are. I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension, but sadly the world zagged on th…

> I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension Since we're talking about Win95, then the 3 characters limit doesn't apply (long filenames was a major new feature of this OS after all). .jpeg and .html were relatively common for example at the time, and worked fine. I find the extension system still kludgy, but arguing th…

Yet for the same compatibility reasons most people stuck with .jpg and .htm, at least in the Windows world. Even now it's very unusual to see a .jpeg extension on a filename.

The metadata that Macs kept in the resource fork go way beyond file type and creator too. It included things like the file's Icon, creation/modification information (so it would survive a trip over the Internet!), loads of stuff for applications (menus, graphics, sounds, etc...), formatting for plain text documents (so they fall back to plain text on unsupported systems), and so much more.

Fun fact: NTFS supports the concept of a resource fork on files, but almost nothing in Windows uses it. I think I've seen more malware hiding stuff in there than legitimate uses in the wild. Worse, even the obvious case of loading a Mac file on a Windows machine it usually fails and falls back to creating the clunky separate directory instead.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#237

Post by ashleyn »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #219

Windows 95 and its immediate successors had a lot of problems regarding stability, memory usage, performance in certain cases, etc. That and the comparison with the NT OS line is a separate discussion however. What is important about Windows 95 was the design of the GUI. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. Even though I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon from the very first moment in 2001 and…

Microsoft in the 1990s had a strong penchant for striking the right balance between power users and the average user. Their products remained full-featured but most of things you didn't use day-to-day were quietly tucked away in areas only power users would care about. There wasn't any real notion of compromising usability for simplicity. If you wanted to customise finer aspects of Windows 95, all it would take is a registry entry. If you wanted to use an advanced feature in Office, all it would take is a deep trip inside the menu bar. If you didn't want to do either of these things, they stayed out of your way.

Apple later pioneered the notion of making products so radically simplistic, they sacrificed functionality on the pretense that power users wouldn't be bothered by the absence of features. There was almost no customisation. You got what you bought and liked it. Finder, the worst file manager I've ever used as a developer, endlessly gets in your way in the name of not letting grandma mess up her system.

Microsoft later badly copied Apple, and the result are horrid and unusable "Metro" style applications.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#238

Post by ashleyn »

ndespres wrote: post #112
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

I used to get frustrated explaining what I thought were simple computer tasks to my mother, but as I've gotten slightly older I am getting just as stuck as she was with some basic computer tasks! I totally get it now. She also reminds me that she used to work at Digital (DEC), on the cutting edge of tech, in the 80's, but left her job to raise me- so I'm the reason she's so far behind, technically!

There's a world of a difference between VAX and today's modern operating systems. Twenty years in the future, I predict user interaction will largely be predicated on artificial intelligence. I can certainly see an older version of myself, frustrated at trying to figure out what sentences will trick the machine into doing what I want it to do rather than simply speaking to it.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#239

Post by samstave »

russellbeattie wrote: post #26

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…

You may not recall, but when win95 came out - there were lines blocks long awaiting to buy it, much like when the iPhone came out.

I recently sold several windows 95 shrink wrapped original copies on eBay which was the OS on 32 3.5” floppy disks. As an original piece of computer history.

Win 95 was monumental and great. Aside from outlook, and excel, the greatest product MS ever made.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#240

Post by thanatropism »

jaclaz wrote: post #23
thanatropism wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 3.1 had window minimization. Confusingly, programs became icons in your "desktop" (which you could only see when minimizing everything).

A lesser known program for Windows 3.1/3.11 was at the time the Norton Desktop, see: http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html that provided, even on Windows 3.1/3.11 roughly the same UI of the Mac OS of the time, very similar, for some aspects, to the later Windows 9x one.

I remember someone who had an all-in-one Compaq PC with a version of Win 3.1 that had a shell with tabs on the top, not too unlike the "ribbon" of modern MS Office.
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