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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#231

Post by bombcar »

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 "..."…

Even with screen sharing, I've said "click the three dots" and then "no, not those, not that one, wait there's another one, no that's the wrong one ..."

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#232

Post by trinix912 »

ninjamar wrote: post #199
xerox13ster wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures. This has been net negative. Now everyone thinks it’s ok to shove every control up there and there’s nowhere to grab a window to move it that isn’t also a button. But the OS interprets button click and mouse drag as cancel the button click. I wish people would stop doing this. We HAVE HI DPI screens with large resolutions and even 640x480 had title bars!!!!! What spa…

On a small macbook that I use for programming, every bit of my screen has been meticulously prepared by me to cram in a lot of functionality

[dead]

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#233

Post by zozbot234 »

whartung wrote: post #211
FergusArgyll wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have to appreciate that the nostalgia is not necessarily how these looked, but also how they worked. Also, there's simply the reminiscing back to the era when these were out. When they were NEW, and revolutionary. All things that cannot be conveyed from a static screenshot. Consider NeXTStep. Something you cannot see from these images are that when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved. Not a frame, t…

> when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved.

That was a factor of available memory bandwidth to the framebuffer. Single-frame updates are something that only became definitely possible around the late 1990s to early 2000s, and that depending on what resolution and color depth you were running. High quality display settings would initially be quite slow to update. In many old PC games, full-screen displays would visibly update with a smooth windowblinds effect. You couldn't do any better than that, because screen updates were dog slow.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#235

Post by zozbot234 »

whartung wrote: post #205
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…

> 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.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#236

Post by cmrdporcupine »

whartung wrote: post #205
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…

> 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…

RE: GEM, the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor was actually a super high quality monitor that was known at the time for producing a crisp comfortable image, and it was higher resolution (640x400) than the Mac (512x342).

GEM on it actually looked really good. The problem was two fold: with the Atari you had the choice of one or the other (colour or mono), the colour was very low resolution, GEM looked squished and crappy and cheap in low (360x200) & med-res (640x200) on colour .. and on the application development side there just wasn't the same caliber and quantitiy of developers to build good looking GEM applications.

But I mean if you look at some of the better more sophisticated applications like Cubase or Calamus or the original version of Logic, they were pretty nicely designed.

The base window decorations were a bit chunky compared to the Mac .. but not awful, and also easily changed. There were accessories that re-themed things via changing the font.

GEM over top of DOS on the PC? Yeah, awful.

The Ventura Publisher branch of GEM looked decent though

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#237

Post by doubled112 »

hulitu wrote: post #175
dspillett wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 2 had plainly visible borders, with decent contrast depending on your colour settings, so you could see what ended where.

The UX designers copied the look, minus the colors, and without functionality. Whoever thinks, that an 1px border for a resizable element on a 4k display is ok, is insane.

The hotkey to allow move and resize from anywhere in a window is my favourite *nix window manager convention.

Windows finally implemented it via PowerToys: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/grab-and...

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#238

Post by hilti »

Thank you so much for this link :-)

I'm studying old operating systems, because it's very interesting how we've been so productive with less screen pixels than we have today. It's basically mind blowing that 800x600 pixels have been a long time enough to get work done.

Currently I'm typing this on an iPhone 17 with a larger screen and after all the years there is nothing like a good charting, dashboarding or spreadsheet on it.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#239

Post by washingupliquid »

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…

> This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs.

Steve indirectly had a hand in this, by emphasizing the humanities. That, unfortunately, backfired as a sort of positive feedback loop.

Someone hired a few underemployed artists onto the team, and the artists invited all their friends and soon took over the department.

People that in an alternate timeline would be smoking weed whilst sculpting wood in a derelict loft somewhere are now the lead designers, using our software as the canvas of a perpetual avant-garde art piece.

They also need to look productive to justify their jobs, so the need to change things is constant.

That's why in 2026 you could have a PhD in CS and still need to watch a YouTube video to learn how to change the volume.

Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? They're simply hiding or moving stuff around at this point while no one has even touched accessibility.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#240

Post by bombcar »

201984 wrote: post #118
vbezhenar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 W…

The entire existence of docker is basically because Linux is impossibly bad at maintaining old software while Windows will still run some terribly old things (though the loss of Win16 is a big one).
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