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Remembering Windows 2000

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Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#181

Post by sergeykish »

thought_alarm wrote: post #135
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-je…

Nice theme, never saw it. Tabs, dropdowns and scrollbar slightly off, title bar decoration quickly becomes invasive, otherwise - super.

Title bar, menubar and toolbar nicely muted down on background windows. Very professional look. And taskbar - so clean. Thank you, I like it even more than Classic theme.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#182

Post by Wowfunhappy »

julianz wrote: post #149
thaeli wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I loved old-school Macs but come one, you couldn't even resize a window by dragging an edge. I think we've moved on from that.

Actually, I prefer only being able to drag from the corner, as OS X did it through Snow Leopard / 10.6 (not sure about Classic?). Too often on modern OS’s I find myself resizing windows by accident, or not resizing them when I mean to because the initiation area is too small.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#183

Post by james412 »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #148
james412 wrote: post #10

Aside from the deep consistency of 2000's UI (after all it more or less progressively improved on the 3.x traditional widget set with in some cases little more than a recompile required to get the new theme), 2000 was the first consumer experience of a PC OS featuring real per-process virtual memory, and this is probably a big reason why everyone (including myself) remembers it so fondly.

Because this would increase stability?

NT had it first, but NT didn't really get much of any consumer exposure. Windows 95 was much closer to the Windows 3.1 everything-shared memory model: 16-bit apps (which were still in widespread use) continued being able to access hardware and each others' memory, and memory belonging to the most recently executed 32-bit app. NTVDM in Windows 2000 also supported 16-bit apps, but they were strictly isolated from each other, the hardware, and any 32-bit app.

The upshot was a 16-bit utility that would crash or corrupt an unrelated app (or the entire machine) in 3.1 or 95 would only crash itself in 2000. The driver model was also completely redesigned, but I don't know much about that.

Any time you hear the old meme about Linux being more stable than Windows, it's important to realize it dates back 20 years when Linux had per-process virtual memory and Windows did not.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#184

Post by Wowfunhappy »

schoolornot wrote: post #7
2bitencryption wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah, just thinking of Snow Leopard makes me swoon... I don't know if the rose-tinted glasses are too strong, or if that OS was really as snappy, simple, and polished as I remember.

10.6 was also Apple's peak server OS. Open Directory + Workgroup Manager set my standard for how OpenLDAP ought to be managed.

Notably, it was also their last server os. OS X server lived on, but as just an app.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#185

Post by duskwuff »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #182
julianz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved old-school Macs but come one, you couldn't even resize a window by dragging an edge. I think we've moved on from that.

Actually, I prefer only being able to drag from the corner, as OS X did it through Snow Leopard / 10.6 (not sure about Classic?). Too often on modern OS’s I find myself resizing windows by accident, or not resizing them when I mean to because the initiation area is too small.

The Platinum UI ended up in a weird middle ground -- windows had thick borders which were clickable, but dragging them would move the window, not resize it!

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#186

Post by anthk »

qubex wrote: post #85
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…

The design of the GUIs were one of the reasons I got interested in two of the exotic beasts of the 1990s OS wars: BeOS and NeXT. BeOS was a deliberately “vapourwave chiselled look with 90s cartoon icons” that screamed F.R.E.N.D.S and Melrose Place and edgy or avant-garde typography in nineties magazines. NeXT on the other hand was austere, alabaster, eminently workable, but... so regular, so regular, so well thought-…

More like vaporwave, 90's were industrial and office design: something to make you feel productive. No 00's kid would understand this, we did. BeOS was a mix between the potential MS Office killer and the multimedia machine capabilities from the late 90's. No cyberpunk, no friends, no avant-garde. Just a boring office cubicle + multimedia production for artists. No, not for vaporwave music. Any music. Techno, classical, R&B, metal... anything. That, and video/image editing.

The late 90's screamed "workplace", "multimedia" and the information exchange era. Brutalist and futurism.

OFC Helvetica was mimicked from press, the media and press were HUGE back in the day, they had the same power as MS, Amazon, FB, Google and Netflix today. So we tried to clone magazines, VCRs, TV's, cubicles and stereos/radios in our computers. We succeeded.

Trying to explain the 90's with "vaporwave" is ridiculous. Those could be maybe for the early 90's demoscene for PC/Amiga. They were as obsolete in late 90's as Windows 98 today.

The late 90's were about replicating the mainstream media in your computer.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#187

Post by fsckboy »

zozbot234 wrote: post #48
ogre_codes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. Windows 2000 was also one of the most consistently designed versions of Windows. XP also introduced tons of design language chaos as they only migrated some of the UI over to the new controls and left big chunks of the OS to languish. I think Control Panel had widget rot well into Windows 10 (Maybe still has this issue?). I only grudgingly moved to XP and shortly after switched to Desktop Linux full time. > I'm…

XP introduced a "new" control panel arrangement by default, but you could easily revert to a simple folder view. Windows 10 is a mess today because of the overlap between the classic Control Panel and the new settings app, but there was nothing like this back then.

you couldn't entirely revert the control panel to "classic". Win2K pioneered moving a bunch of stuff out of the control panel entirely and into Computer Management (which you could get to by right clicking on the computer icon)

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#188

Post by ubercow13 »

ajtjp wrote: post #171
ubercow13 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on if you're talking boot times, or program loading times. I agree, every computer I had until 2007 had terrible boot times. But I've compared how long it takes to start Word on my Pentium II 450 MHz running Windows 98, with Word 2000, to my Core i5 2500 K (3.3 GHz) running Windows 8.1, with Word 2010. The Pentium II wins. I don't how much of the difference was Windows versus Office, but it's a sad indicat…

Office has become way way slower, I would mostly put it down to that. Lean applications can still start pretty fast. One other thing making it slower is antivirus software scanning every binary you run before it opens, including Defender. Turning off Defender is a reliable way to improve app load times.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#189

Post by anthk »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #143
pwned1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.

Windows XP is Windows 2000 with a theme. Though the difference in resources was Win2k could run on 32MB of ram, and XP ran on 256, despite being the same OS with the same functionality, even the same drivers. If you had beefy enough hardware, which we all eventually did years after XP came out, it ran as fast and almost as stable as 2000. If you didn't mind the bland theme, and wanted higher FPS while gaming, with mo…

xp ran under 64 and 128 too. But with 128 was a bit slow.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#190

Post by Animats »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #141
Animats wrote: post #63

I managed to avoid the whole Windows-on-DOS family. I went from DOS 6.2 to Windows NT 3.51, then Windows NT 4, then Windows 2000, then Windows 7. Only the good ones. Why run Microsoft's dud products? Now, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's too bad that Microsoft no longer sells a good desktop OS. Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. Do not want.

> Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. ... as a Service. I'm stuck with it, but God, I miss Win2k and Win2k3.

I was OK with Windows 7. So was most of corporate America. That's when they finally got the thing pretty much debugged. Between the Static Driver Verifier and the classifier for panic dumps sent to Microsoft HQ, they were finally able to get the kernel to crash very rarely.

Microsoft had to apply heavy pressure to get companies and individuals to upgrade to Windows 10. It was "an offer you can't refuse", not an improved product. That's different from previous versions, where there was real forward progress.

Yes, "as a Service", and with built-in spyware, er, "telemetry".

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