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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#141

Post by zozbot234 »

pjc50 wrote: post #113
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.

It's a tradeoff. A 800x600 CRT will look "blurry" compared to a LCD when rendering old-style GUIs or text in a properly hinted font, but the 800x600 LCD will look blocky and pixelated when rendering a real-world photorealistic image compared to the CRT. The real look of that CRT is more like taking that old 800x600 photo and upscaling it to 1440x1080 on a modern FullHD display. Blurry to be sure, but not blocky or pixelated. Early LCDs also had terrible image persistence/ghosting issues that showed up when playing games.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#142

Post by isityettime »

skydhash wrote: post #128
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…

> Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings Wasn’t that in Emacs for decades?

Yes. The macOS menu bar is also searchable, which is cool. Unity on Ubuntu also had this back in the day.

Most people haven't experienced "addressable interfaces" like Emacs and don't know what they're missing when they only have visuospatial navigability. I would like to see searching and jumping make bigger impacts in mainstream UX design.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#143

Post by hulitu »

All of them look much, much better than Windows 10, Windows 11, Android or iOS although all run on less powerfull hardware.

But using only one level of library to draw on the screen "is so lame'. /s

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#144

Post by red_admiral »

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).

I think the factor here is that the screens were CRTs.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#145

Post by isityettime »

andai wrote: post #87
CalRobert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still want alt+underlined letter for menus. Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.

Yeah, this is the one thing about Linux I constantly miss when using anything else. I wonder how hard it would be to make a thing for that...

Here's a maintained fork of one I used to use in another life: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#146

Post by 201984 »

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

I'm 23 and IMO, the Windows desktop style peaked somewhere in Windows 95-2000. The first Windows I ever used was XP, so I'm mostly making that decision based off screenshots and emulators.

UIs back then were dense, didn't waste large amounts of space in a misguided attempt to be "minimalist", and had affordances for ease of use. There was no scrollbar hiding, no animations that made the user wait for no reason other than the designer's ego, very visible borders on windows and buttons that made finding/resizing them easier, large bars at the top of windows that let you move them around, and actual text for most buttons instead of icons that are anyone's guess what they mean. Thankfully some of this can be dialed back in the Windows 11 accessibility settings, at least for missing scrollbars and getting rid of time wasting animations, but a lot of programs don't respect those.

That's right there is a good indicator for which programs care about their users. I'm using your program because I want to actually do something, not waste time watching your designers show off.

I've disabled animations on my Android phone too, and it gives an extremely noticable speedup. Menus appear right when I click them, instead of a second later as they slide into existence. Too bad iPhones just replace the slide with a fade of equal duration; disrespect for the user's time like that is yet another reason I will never buy one.

Those older GUIs didn't try to hide the filesystem hierarchy either. It infuriates me to no end when I use a new OS and have to hunt down the way to show the disk root, or filename extensions, or hidden files. MacOS was especially bad; I had to look up a freaking keyboard shortcut that I never would have found on my own. The common reason is so "normal people" can use the interfaces, but I think that's infantilizing and is why tons of Gen Z don't know what files or folders are. Most people can learn .docx means a Word document, and C:\Users\TheirName is where their files are.

(Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it. People will just go right back to Windows 11 because it's somehow better.)

There's some improvements possible, for sure. I'd like to see some programs put hint letters over buttons when you press a modifier like Ctrl so you can easily see what the shortcuts are. I don't know of any that do, but it'd be very useful for more complex software like drawing programs or word processors.

edit: typo

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#148

Post by skydhash »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #61
hermitcrab wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely an element of nostalgia. However, a lot of earlier desktop OS GUIs do seem to be more internally consistent and with more emphasis on usability than the current crop. I think part of the issue is that things that might make sense on a phone have bled into desktop OSes, where they make a lot less sense.

I don't mean this in a dismissive way but based on your profile I'd say you're > 25. I'm curious about the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with the those os's

I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds).

Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#149

Post by hecifato »

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 to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.

I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this.

Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#150

Post by lelanthran »

BoppreH wrote: post #75
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.

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…

> loading bars (replaced with throbbers)

There is a very practical reason for this; most GUI apps are webapps (whether local or not is irrelevant), and the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).

As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.

There might have been worse ways to design the fetch API, but off-hand, I can't think of any - what came before it was immensely better for a user experience.

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