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

Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

typewritten.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 407 posts

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#91

Post by pjc50 »

adrianwaj wrote: post #65
pjc50 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screen real estate is precious unless on the very largest screens. Especially vertical. I'm a big fan of being able to put the app list/bar on the right, keeping the maximum vertical space available and allowing its captions to be readable horizontally. > Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify? This feels like the result of a competition to design the worst possible use…

"are going to find it a disaster." True, it's not a good solution and there is Subvocal Recognition (SVR) that detects electrical signals in the neck or jaw using pads. Hall effect keyboards are pretty good in terms of sensitivity I find. Lip reading by HAL was also a disaster for Frank Poole. Maybe a large screen that can easily be flipped vertical/horizontal would work well. People already do it with the their smar…

> Maybe a large screen that can easily be flipped vertical/horizontal would work well. People already do it with the their smartphones - why not stationary screens? Have the OS detect when it happens so it can make any predetermined layout changes. Maybe have it rotate using a small motor? Cable connections into a base unit to avoid entanglement.

Good news: all of this except the motorization is already available from Dell and others. Common office setup. I often see people with one screen in portrait format for reading documents.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#92

Post by lproven »

jchw wrote: post #13

Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/ At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.

ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is.

https://guidebookgallery.org/

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#94

Post by lproven »

cout wrote: post #28
giamma wrote: post #11

No mention of GeOS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks

There is the 16-bit Geoworks Ensemble (PC/GEOS), at least.

Which is FOSS now!

https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#95

Post by vessenes »

Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos.

A nice vibe coding project here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#96

Post by jaffa2 »

adrianwaj wrote: post #43
xnorswap wrote: post #30

This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years. Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.

I am starting to think the top half of the screen should be the desktop, the bottom half should be the start menu but already activated and full of programs. No conventional bottom panel-bar with a start button. A right-most column should exist that fills up with a list of opened windows. [1] When I first saw Win95 with a cleared desktop, I immediately thought - where has everything gone? Why is this empty? Decades l…

I just turn off desktop icons. Bam! Problem of messy desktop goes away.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#97

Post by wink »

OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?

The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#98

Post by Liftyee »

bronlund wrote: post #32

I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.

I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc.

Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#99

Post by abanana »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
bronlund wrote: post #32

I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.

Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs. > in some applications they see…

> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research

Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn.

It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#100

Post by lproven »

ori_b wrote: post #53
piekvorst wrote: post #51

No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).

The plan 9 interface has evolved quite a bit, but it's largely invisible in screenshots. The differences are in things like triple click behavior, jumps to insertion points, effective use of mouse cursor warping, chording.

Screenshots -- or GIFs -- of Plan 9 compared with Inferno would be most instructive.

The Plan 9 folks I've talked to are a bit shocked by this, but I preferred Inferno's GUI to plain old Rio/Acme etc.

Post reply on HN