Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.
Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
141–150 of 226 posts
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#142Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you used nLite? I credit this tool for making me into a Windows power user. Taking the OS apart checkbox-by-checkbox gave me a good understanding of how the pieces fit together and what is required vs optional. https://www.nliteos.com/
Ohh man, nlite! The memory you just unlocked for me ahahaha
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#144Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
> So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM. I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point. One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at…
If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again, but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total terra incognita for them.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
Has there ever been a non Oop GUI toolkit in those days? Even Win32 was kinda "c with objects".
Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records.
Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#147If you like it, you should check out era X Windows managers with a multi button mouse. Same hierarchical start menu, but bring it up from any location on the desktop with right mouse click! Then most simple apps don't really need menu bars or windows controls, just maybe small resize handles at the corners, use right click to do the rest as well. Once you created a perfect arrangement for each virtual desktop, save i…
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
> So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM. I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point. One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at…
I think a lot of those predictions came from a world unconcerned with cores and threading.
The jump from sub ghz to 1 ghz (p2 to p3) came about suddenly, the jump from 1ghz to 3ish ghz came about suddenly (p3 to p4); and then things moved to prioritizing chip real estate for cores/threading/parallelism.
The chips we have now are great, but it would be damn nice to have a 10ghz core somewhere.
( I eventually upgraded my RAM before ditching the Presario, too, but I think it's because at the time I wanted to play Dark Age of Camelot without lagging to death in team fights.)
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
bottom-end (600-900) dollar range in 2001-2002ish got you between 128mb and 256mb of ram. my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the slowest hard drive in the world. Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines were targetting that number.
Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
If you were real lucky you'd get a Sony VAIO; but fashion be damned it had the same crap specs as the rest of the grandma gifts.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> windows didn't really get any more usable after that... The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently. I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than window…
> everything is folders and files idea of the start menu Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell. I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface…