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Remembering Windows 2000

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Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#131

Post by kccqzy »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #17

Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our suppos…

Windows 2000 always reminded me of brutalist architecture. It was efficient, functional, and worked well, but it wasn't pretty at all.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion but I rather liked Windows Vista's design. It was still very compact compared with later designs, and it had a certain charm from its prevalent use of translucency. I disliked XP for the same reason you cited, and upgraded to Vista almost as soon as it came out, despite early Vista's instability.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#133

Post by zozbot234 »

barrkel wrote: post #121
linguae wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. One of my annoyances with Microsoft's post-Windows 2000 design philosophy is its penchant for consuming large amounts of vertical space. This started with the large title bars used in the Windows XP Luna theme. I wasn't impressed with this "Fischer-Price" theme and always switched to the Windows Classic theme, which I continued to do even during the Windows 7 days. Next, Microsoft introduced the ribbon in Of…

Linux has been much worse for margins in UIs, FWIW.

Really? It looks just fine to me. People like to complain about the GTK3 header bars, but those encompass everything that you'd previously find in toolbars and menubars, at least for simple utils. And they enable full touch readiness, as do the slightly bigger buttons and widgets.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#134

Post by duskwuff »

thaeli wrote: post #122
mixmastamyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they forgot to mention the fantastic, intuitive, and functional GUI rivaled by Mac OS 9, Nextstep, OS/2, BeOS etc. This era was the pinnacle. While we've been thrown a few bones like start menu search, most of the gratuitous changes have been for the worse. Sleeker but harder to use for professionals. Gnome 2 was approaching Win2k but then made a hard turn into tablet/novice land. XFCE is in the neighborhood but…

MacOS 7.1 was the pinnacle, imo. MacOS 9 had lots of the space-wasting pretty chrome we're decrying here in WinXP.

Respectfully disagree. The Platinum appearance (which debuted in Mac OS 8, not 9) used roughly the same UI metrics which were typical for System 7 applications. It had to, as it was applied to all applications, not just ones which opted in!

Beyond that... the system appearance used prior to Platinum was, simply put, crude. It was an outgrowth of a UI design which had originally been constructed for black-and-white systems with limited CPU power, and it wasn't especially consistent. It lacked standard UI elements for many controls which had become common, like dropdown menus, utility windows, disclosure triangles, or tristate checkboxes, forcing many applications to implement their own inconsistent versions of these items. Even for the UI elements it implemented, like buttons and checkboxes, its appearance was simplistic in the extreme -- buttons were black outlined round-rects; checkboxes were black outlined squares, etc. There was very little use of color or shading outside of window chrome -- most of the UI was black and white, just as it had been from the start.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#135

Post by thought_alarm »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #17

Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our suppos…

I actually hated Win2K when it came out and tried to hold to NT 4.0 as long as I could, although I'm sure some of that was just youthful arrogance.

If I recall correctly, Win2K was a lot slower than NT 4.0 on the same hardware, and it featured some really bad UI ideas, like menus that auto-hide advanced menu items.

By the time XP was released I gave up the fight.

The initial XP theme was just awful; clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the OS X Aqua. It's too bad. The MS Whistler prototype screenshots looked great.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/whistler2257

The later XP theme (Powerpack?) was half decent.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#137

Post by danfritz »

The article missed the best part, you could install Windows 2000 from 4 floppy disks!

I've used it a lot in my younger years, it only was manageable after SP4. God those updates took forever

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#138

Post by TeMPOraL »

ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #14

For those who liked Windows 2000's no-nonsense interface, another forgotten masterpiece IMO was Windows Server 2003 as a desktop OS. It had all of the clean minimalism of Windows 2000, both in terms of UI and lack of cruft, with the good bits of XP installable on demand. It's my most fondly remembered Microsoft OS.

Same here. I don't remember where I got it from, I think I had a license from MSDN AA when I went to university. It was hands down my favorite Windows ever. 2000 was the second most-favorite, and 7 was the third.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#139

Post by proverbialbunny »

ubercow13 wrote: post #55
proverbialbunny wrote: post #3

Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. There is something nice about a bug free operating system that "just works" as intended. No problems, no hassles. No load times, even back then. Back then it was common to have a computer with 128MB+ of ram but Windows 2000 ran on 64MB of that, so it was the first non page file heavy OS that just snapped. In comparison, a year late…

No load times?! I seem to remember Win 95-XP era involved almost comically long boot times especially if you waited for your hard drive to stop churning after getting to the desktop, but maybe I am misremembering. It wasn't so much the OS's fault, though.

Yah 95-Me era ran pretty slow and horrible.

Though 95 was pretty revolutionary when it came out.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#140

Post by TeMPOraL »

zozbot234 wrote: post #104
nix23 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays. Love the expression 'over powered terminals' that's sooo true!

> But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays. Quite right; the vast majority of "actual work" that one would do locally on the machine, requires a lot less power than booting up a web browser and surfing to a random "modern" website. Funny how that works. We're all forgetting about the 'real' work that we routinely do on our computers, because that kind of thing has gotten so rock-solid and doesn't even mea…

Problem is, the actual work we used to do locally and now do over webapps has to pay the performance price of browsing the web - resulting in severe UX degradation for anything but the most casual of uses.
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