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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

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Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#111

Post by avn2109 »

ant6n wrote: post #64
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

I'm not sure about the 'huge strides'. I feel nowadays with 'flat design' (is that the right term?) I don't know where I can click and what actions will be performed. It's like the UI is a bunch of text labels, but they may actually be links, but they may actually perform an action. Although there's no way to know, since the label doesn't say what action is performed, and since we don't have mice anymore, we don't ha…

Fair points. The lack of affordances is bothersome indeed, but presumably the UX design fashion will swing back in the other direction at some point in the near-ish future.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#112

Post by gdubs »

tammer wrote: post #41

The most surprising thing about these is the stark reminder of Microsoft's dominance during this era. Whether it's the terminal emulator running on NT4 or Internet Explorer being the only sensible browser on a Mac, Microsoft has fallen far with this crowd.

This brought back memories for me. Around this time I was in school running 3D graphics packages on NT. SGI was losing out to commodity graphics cards, NT was fast and stable, and OSX was just starting to trickle in to our labs (and would become dominant within several years with the explosion of the PowerBook titanium.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#113

Post by scrumper »

trm42 wrote: post #72
vbezhenar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think that Windows NT 4 was the best Windows OS ever. And may be the best GUI ever. I always switch to classic theme, if I have to use Windows. In last versions it's not very classic, though.

For me, it was W2K. It has the stability of NT series better usability, drivers and it was quite fast. Windows XP made simple things a lot harder and slower :)

2k was the first Windows version I remember that I didn't have to reboot daily. In my first proper job (a web developer, in 2000, writing what you'd now call 'single page applications' in DHTML) I'd go home at night and not even log out. The next day, it'd be waiting for me. At most I'd reboot weekly.

I also loved the workstation-y, crisp UI that would let me drag a window with its contents around the screen. My computer wasn't even all that powerful by the standards of the time.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#114

Post by tjr »

noinsight wrote: post #99
lighthawk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time, because he disagrees with using sites that might somehow involve something that isn't free source, or because he just delegates to others the task of surfing the web and getting information for him. He definitely spends a lot of time emailing though. I admire h…

For personal reasons he doesn't have a personal internet connection at all. He has some sort of bot that he emails links to and it sends the source (or plaintext?) back to him for reading. (At least it was like that a couple of years ago) I believe he also has issues with non-free JavaScript which I suppose precludes him from using websites that use JavaScript (or I guess he could block it).

As of a few months ago, he has been browsing the web (sometimes) using IceCat and Tor.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#115

Post by ashark »

famousactress wrote: post #95
72deluxe wrote: post #12

I really liked these. This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 beca…

> I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware This is not consistent with my memory of the time.

Definitely. Listening to an MP3 while browsing the internet? Hope you like pops and skips every time you load a new page. Starting a game? Better close everything first. Hitting swap? Have fun sl...ow....l...y... moving your cursor where you want it.

Applied to Windows and Linux both, with the bonus on Linux that X11 couldn't even move windows around the screen without all kinds of artifacts and stuttering.

Then again, you can't even fit a single browser tab with Gmail open in the RAM they ran on, so you gotta cut them some slack.

However, BeOS was practically miraculous and suffered few or none of those problems on the same hardware. That it didn't survive the OS wars is proof that we are not in the Best Timeline.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#116

Post by jjuhl »

joosters wrote: post #26
longwave wrote: post #18

Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one. Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

I've tried it a few times, but it's just so painful when you want things to align. Now, if you had a really good code layout tool that could 'snap' parts of lines so that they horizontally align at sensible places, I think non-monospace fonts could be useful. In fact, having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. I work in emacs and it's frustrating when the editor decides to 'fix' your own spacing…

I recommend clang-format : http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#117

Post by anonymfus »

Xophmeister wrote: post #105
pivo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)

Wasn't that just a technological workaround, though? The hardware couldn't support overlapping windows.

Only top level application windows were tiled. Dialog windows were floating above them and they were overlapping.

There was no need for hardware support because windows were not buffered, they repainted itself when the system told them to do it.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#118

Post by tpurves »

72deluxe wrote: post #59
raverbashing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.

How this is true. My brother had an Elonex Pentium 120Mhz laptop, and that was truly brought to its knees when playing an MP3. Playing mods and xms was alright, unless they were complicated. Encoding MP3s was another thing altogether - I was wowed when a schoolmate had a dual CPU machine that ENCODED faster than it ripped CDs. I could only dream of such a thing - encoding was far far far slower than reading the data…

Yep I remember this too. In my engineering college days 97/98 in the 90s we were fairly aggressive early adopters of mp3s. We quickly learned that to reliably dj a party with just mp3s you needed at least someone with a 133MHz Pentium to not stutter or have issues on any tracks.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#119

Post by rsync »

mangecoeur wrote: post #45
72deluxe wrote: post #12

I really liked these. This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 beca…

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

"Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?"

Yes. I also miss being able to do everything with a keyboard shortcut. This is a much-overlooked feature of the Windows UI that I think is not given enough credit.

I did it all in Windows - from 3.1 to NT3 to NT4 to XP - and I learned to hate hate the Windows OS and registries and so on ...

But I always liked the UI and given the choice between the Mac UI (not the OS) and ... say ... NT4 or XP ... I would choose Windows as the UI.

(FWIW, I do prefer a minimal ratpoison/ion UI over all of them)

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#120

Post by krallja »

a3n wrote: post #33
sengork wrote: post #6

So both creators of C used Windows...

Was probably the cheapest way to get a terminal to unix running at the time. I've been in lots of shops where the given computer is Windows, because that's what the rest of the company runs, and most of my time is spent in terminal windows to unix (Unix long ago, Linux these days). I recall trying to get actual unix on a PC, back around '94 or '95. I actually contacted the local Sun rep, and it was cumbersome and exp…

Wouldn't Linux or BSD have been available? These screenshots are from 2002, not 1992.
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