Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology

versionmuseum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 11 posts

Re: Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology

#5

Post by a1o »

mepian wrote: post #2

There is an older, more complete gallery of operating systems and their versions: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html

Is it just me or is the screenshots of The Apple II Desktop more squished (horizontally) than they were? Or were the monitor pixels not that square at the time? Also the winshell list is missing that file organizer shell that was used in some versions of the Compaq Presario all in one computer. :/

Re: Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology

#7

Post by tivert »

This is kind of neat from a nostalgia standpoint, but I wish there was some kind of "Encyclopedia of Operating System UI," that broke UI features and paradigms down into their smallest units, described their mechanics, and tracked them across different operating systems and versions. Probably with a particular emphasis on defunct systems when there was a lot more diversity and innovation (e.g. the Canon Cat Leap Keys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c)

Re: Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology

#8

Post by thfuran »

tivert wrote: post #7

This is kind of neat from a nostalgia standpoint, but I wish there was some kind of "Encyclopedia of Operating System UI," that broke UI features and paradigms down into their smallest units, described their mechanics, and tracked them across different operating systems and versions. Probably with a particular emphasis on defunct systems when there was a lot more diversity and innovation (e.g. the Canon Cat Leap Keys…

Well, now I want a new keyboard.

Re: Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology

#9

Post by tivert »

thfuran wrote: post #8
tivert wrote: post #7

This is kind of neat from a nostalgia standpoint, but I wish there was some kind of "Encyclopedia of Operating System UI," that broke UI features and paradigms down into their smallest units, described their mechanics, and tracked them across different operating systems and versions. Probably with a particular emphasis on defunct systems when there was a lot more diversity and innovation (e.g. the Canon Cat Leap Keys…

Well, now I want a new keyboard.

> Well, now I want a new keyboard.

Good luck. I've kinda wished there was some company that would sell custom keyboard where you could have switches in new places. But unfortunately, "custom keyboard" almost always means custom keycaps, and keyboard fads seem to mainly be about having fewer and fewer keys.

Pretty soon, I'm sure we'll see minimalist keyboards with only one key where you have to type in scan-codes manually in binary, Morse-code style.

I've dreamed about having a custom keyboard with two leap keys (but spaces on the outer ends of the spacebar instead of the middle) and a couple custom shift keys.

Re: Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology

#10

Post by qingcharles »

tech-historian wrote: post #6

Creator of the site here. Thanks for posting! I've been meaning to update things with newer screenshots. Life gets in the way sometimes.

Really appreciate the amount of work that's gone into this!

Is this a better quality version of the Amazon homepage?

https://web.archive.org/web/20040715235459im_/http://g-image...

Does anyone know how the headings were done in smallcaps like that? I remember my sites had the same in the mid-90s, so it must have been some simple feature of HTML, but I can't find it in the spec. I am sure this is pre-CSS.

Post reply on HN