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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#111

Post by vessenes »

dotancohen wrote: post #101
vessenes wrote: post #95

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…

I may have some KDE 2 and 3 screenshots to add.

Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#112

Post by bityard »

Liftyee wrote: post #98
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.

For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#113

Post by pjc50 »

wink wrote: post #97

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).

The monitors of the time were a lot blurrier than the screen you're looking at the screenshots on. For maximum verisimilitude you'd have to have photographs of screens.

I got an 800x600 LCD monitor in about 1999, and it was a massive upgrade.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#114

Post by criddell »

Liftyee wrote: post #98
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.

You can do interesting things in the scroll bar. Some coding editors (like Visual Studio) cram a lot of useful information into the scroll bar.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#115

Post by abanana »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #50

There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better? To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever

Basing one's opinion on how a static screenshot looks, is the reason we've moved towards pretty looks and away from usability concerns.

As other commentors have said, the overriding concern with these older OSs was to make them as easy as possible to use. It would never have crossed these developers' minds to, for example, hide the scrollbar because they think it looks ugly.

Looking at a screenshot doesn't really tell you anything if you're not familiar with it, but it's a nice reminder of using that software for those who are.

In most of the comments here, I'm not seeing "nostalgia" or "the love for youth". I'm seeing frustration with how the carefully researched and developed principles have been forgotten.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#117

Post by spider-mario »

anthk wrote: post #59
hermitcrab wrote: post #54

Invisible scroll bars are a source of constant annoyance. And it sometimes takes me several attempts to move a window, because of all the various clickable things without visible boundaries. Frustrating.

On GNU/Linux run this command, it will fix it for all the GTK based desktops, such as XFCE, Gnome and Mate: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false Under Mac you might have a similar Cocoa setting or whatever is called (nsproperties?) with "defaults write".

On Mac, the setting is also simply exposed in the normal “System Settings” app. “Appearance” → “Show scroll bars” → “Always”.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#118

Post by 201984 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #108
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #69

I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.

You want Linux. Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them. GUI frameworks provide features for applications to draw their UI. A selection of numerous windows managers and desktop environments allows you to choose the best GUI shell to work in. It is somewhat of a bazaar, with different components sometimes not fitting perfectly into each other and there's a constant migration to a…

The "constant migration to a new best thing" is a big problem. Once written, a program should be able to run forever, but this is only true on Windows for GUIs and on Linux only for some CLIs. Arch just recently dropped the original vi from its repos because "it no longer compiled" with stricter GCC settings, and if you want to run an older GUI, just forget about it. It's hars to blame people for only targeting the Web or Windows when those two will work forever, but on Linux you have to keep up with the endless treadmill of X11 to Wayland, GTK 2 to 3 to 4, Qt 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, pulseaudio to pipewire, etc., and if you miss just one you may as well give up.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#119

Post by BoppreH »

spider-mario wrote: post #106
BoppreH wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc. But we did gain some nice things! - Tabs. - Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures. - Document editors remembering unsaved changes. - Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. - Ctrl+P m…

> Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. Not always positive. The form briefly loses focus for two seconds (while you open your password manager or whatever) and you are shouted at to “PLEASE ENTER A VALID USERNAME” in red.

Sometimes I see it complaining _on every keypress_. Certainly annoying, but much better than the old "invalid field" red text at the very bottom, leaving you to scroll back up and guess what's wrong.
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