161–170 of 271 posts
Awww, "My Briefcase"! I had totally forgotten that was a thing :) What a nice little nostalgia trip.
Awww, "My Briefcase"! I had totally forgotten that was a thing :) What a nice little nostalgia trip.
As an 8 year old child, I never understood what briefcases were but that didn't prevent me from having tons of them.
It was a neat concept. I used to use that to sync stuff stored on my school's student network drive with a floppy (and later flash drive) with my home PC. They definitely didn't describe it well unless you went digging for why it exists.
Wow, what a flashback! This was the OS I actually grew up with. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and playing Carnivores 2 on my Dad's Windows 98 PC. Even the slowness and unresponsiveness is there, just like I remember! Yeah...this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be in regards to technology and what it would allow for the general population. I still think we're not there, but we…
> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline. There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with differ…
Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
To me the omnibox is the only way I know how access certain settings. I have no idea where they are located in this maze of categories and subcategories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been known to send C&Ds to various sites that host old versions like this. "no longer supported" is a flimsy argument for abandonware anyway. by that reasoning, Windows 7 is abandonware and it still runs basically every Windows program ever.
Most of the abandonware sites that I've seen are aware that it is illegal, will only post software that has not been sold or supported for a certain time frame (usually a decade), and deliberately avoid companies that are known to be hostile to the concept. If a product comes up for sale again, some sites will remove the software at their own initiative. While those self imposed criteria may be regarded as acts of se…
If a company is sending out cease & desists, it's not abandonware by definition.
Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean before windows tried to be designed as a a tablet OS while being on desktop for 8.0, failed on both as easily predicted, and then refused to admit the mistake ever since beside the one mandatory change of adding a normal start button / menu back? That full screen start view was one hell of an abomination....
Sadly the current start menu is far from normal. Normal would a simple menuized view of a folder hierarchy, what we have is some abomination tied into the Windows Store in mysterious ways that cause it to break under a wide variety of circumstances in such a way that an in-place reinstall is the only sure-fire fix.
Linux got this standard arbitrary menu categories thing but in the end people use menus to launch a program so I believe a simple A-Z list with a search box should be enough.
Throwing app store stuff in there is not okay though (as in the current windows situation and the previous ubuntu affiliate links in the dash bar).
Back when the system settings could be reached with less clicks, were organised in a logical way and didn't use most of the screen as white-space.
This (broken search) is the single biggest complaint I have with Windows 10. Everything else I can overlook.
What interests me is the core interactions with Windows systems remain mostly the same, unchanged, in the span of last 20 years!
Isn't the same true for osx and linux?
Example tasks would be, "run a program," "find a file on disk," "save your work," "copy and paste between applications," "close a window."
Examples that would often fail include updating configuration settings or manipulating disks. These are important tasks, but not core tasks.
Restricting Linux to the mass market distros, my limited experience is they've been reasonably consistent. They can probably use Win-R to run a program. These distros mostly use the ZXCV clipboard keys, and adopt other Windows-like conventions like Ctrl-S to save and clicking an X to close a window.
Some Linux distros could fail some reasonable tasks because of poor design; e.g. I recall Ubuntu's tiny hitbox for resizing windows being very annoying.
On OS X / macOS, Apple has chaned things up with features like autosave, which fundamentally changed how some applications behave. But according to my test, I'd just tell the person, "hit command S" and while it will create a new revision instead of saving the file, this doesn't do a thing we don't want.
I think the biggest lack of core consistency is in Electron apps and other non-native UI creeping in. I don't think I'd pin that on OS designers, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been known to send C&Ds to various sites that host old versions like this. "no longer supported" is a flimsy argument for abandonware anyway. by that reasoning, Windows 7 is abandonware and it still runs basically every Windows program ever.
I think that kind of boils down to the ‘spirit of the law’ kinda thing. Windows 98, conversely; cannot run modern software, and the majority of software in use for the last decade - it is only going to be installed as an experiment by geeks like us, for the most part.
Sometimes you just have to take calculated risks. Like the sites that have VT100 ROM images for VT100 emulators.
The risk of getting a C&D letter, or worse-yet a lawsuit, are tiny compared to the reward of being able to emulate and study a classic computing system. The copyright owner may be more than happy to look the other way.
And there really are cases where the company that owns the copyright is simply gone. Then it's probably safe to take a chance on it.