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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#291

Post by evandrofisico »

kps wrote: post #176
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…

> - Tabs. Should have been a generic window manager feature.

fluxbox have been doing that for over 20 years

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#292

Post by abanana »

zozbot234 wrote: post #235
whartung wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You can't really get it from these screenshots, but I'll give an example of what you're talking about. I remember GEM when it came out, and it simply looked terrible. Not just their color choice, but simply that…

> The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy. The Amiga was designed to look good on the crappiest TV around. It was a home computer, not a professional workstation. But if you had a nice monitor, high-res B&W screen modes were easily available.

Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor?

I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#293

Post by senko »

washingupliquid wrote: post #230
abanana wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Too many developers nowadays don't know this. Guess they've never been on the phone with an elderly relative in tears because she can't figure out basic tasks on an iPad anymore after years of learning how. That's when you realize you, as a highly-skilled technical person, can't either, because they've moved, hidden, or otherwise obfuscated them. Yesterday I learned there are two icons in the Files app called "..."…

A few weeks ago I was co-hosting a live coding session (in front of a crowd, it was pretty collaborative, back-and-forth).

I had to authorize something with Firebase, for which I had to auth with Google, for which I had to do a MFA with my (Pixel) phone.

Usually it's "are you trying to auth" and finger-to-the-scanner, but around that time this particular way didn't work. It also didn't want to send me a text or a call to auth me.

No, I had to find an OTP code. Easy, right? Wrong. The instructions, and the docs, don't match where it was in that particular version of Android, and there were a bunch of blind alleys that were named basically the same.

It took me like 10 minutes, on stage, browsing my phone (thankfully, not casted to screen) to find the friggin' option. Thankfully the cohost was doing the presenting at that time, but it was pretty lousy.

And this is using Google's OS on a Google phone doing a Google auth flow for a Google property. And I'm a techie who's been using Android for 15+ years now. And I did the exact same dance a few weeks before that - also so roundabout I had no idea how I stumbled on the correct page.

User experience my ass.

PS. The regular "are you trying to sign in?" flow works again. No idea what happened - wasn't me.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#294

Post by zuzululu »

im just scrolling through these while I prepare for a VC pitch session and I realize these UI are actually pretty darn good ?

Like the old Windows 98 UI (probably biased) to me just handles so much, why can't apps just look like that? Its boring sure but there's no complexity or inferred action there like modern apps ?

Why do seniors struggle to use modern mobile phones but in those days they could easily work through those UIs?

Just some ranting here but it's shockingly better than what I have currently on Mac

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#295

Post by dallen33 »

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.

Thank you for all these links - brought back a ton of memories, especially the Whistler screenshots. I remember running those back in the day.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#296

Post by abanana »

dspillett wrote: post #170
kps wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Took out usability features to make them "look nicer"’ is exactly how Steve Jobs gave us the double-click, undiscoverable and timing-sensitive.

Double-click came out of Xerox's research park. Apply might have been the first to put that into a popular desktop PC solution, but it wasn't their design any more than the rest of the system they copied. There are arguments that a second button was a much better idea, but that would still not be immediately discoverable and even with many buttons in modern solutions we _still_ have double-clicking.

I've always heard it came from Xerox PARC, but even if it originated at Apple, it would have been one of their OS devs. It's nuts how the cult of Steve Jobs leads some to label him as the inventor of everything.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#299

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

Notably, NeXT scrollbars were also on the left edge of the window, the logic being that (at least for left-to-right languages) most people focus on the left side of the document more often. I remember liking it.

I wonder why Apple swapped back to the right-hand scrollbars with OS X. I guess just because that's what classic MacOS and nearly everyone else did.

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