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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#371

Post by hecifato »

tom_ wrote: post #328
hecifato wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me crazy. Even looking at these old screenshots you just know that these systems we outputting a display resolution lower than 1024x768. When I was checking out the MacBook Neo a while back I was disappointed that the resolution is not natively x2 scaled. It uses fractional scaling when macOS handles fractional scaling quite poorly. I've set the resolution on my M1 MBP to 1280x800 so it was x2 scaled and…

Over 75% (well... just...) of the screenshots are 1024x768 or greater - though admittedly typically not by much. Over half (well, again: just!) are 1152x864 or larger.

I meant more that those systems at the time would have likely been paired with lower resolution displays.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#372

Post by lproven »

rmason wrote: post #319
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast. For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3…

> I don't know what happened to GEM.

Choosing to interpret you literally:

Apple sued, and DR had to cripple GEM 2. The Atari ST version was unaffected.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/01/business/digital-research...

https://books.google.im/books?id=w3IudMVoEusC&pg=PA2&redir_e...

Caldera made it GPL in 1999.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1999/04/27/gem-the-gui-t...

The FreeGEM project modernised it and added back not only all the functionality that DR removed, such as overlapping windows and desktop icons and things, but also additional features from the runtime-only GEM/4 and GEM/5, such as Bézier curves and things.

https://www.seasip.info/Gem/History/freegem2.html

OpenGEM was the last distro of FreeGEM getting updates, and it's included in FreeDOS.

https://multiboot-windows.dscloud.me/All_Pages_for_DOS_GUIs/...

Back on the Atari ST, EmuTOS started out as a minimal stub boot ROM for the all-FOSS AFROS replacement OS for the Aranym emulator; over time, EmuTOS evolved into a complete FOSS replacement ROM for the ST line -- and to recreate GEM, they went back to some of those Caldera source files.

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

As to the bigger more general question of why PC GEM didn't compete...

DR's GUI was originally one element of DR's catalogue. GEM ran on Concurrent DOS, and DR-DOS included a cut-down version that's just a file-manager and app-launcher, called ViewMAX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewMAX

(The beta version of ViewMAX 3 ended up FOSS too.)

DR had a full multitasking DOS-compatible OS on the 286, something like 4 years before OS/2 1.0. However, it used a feature that Intel removed from the shipping 80286 chip. The shipping PC AT could not multitask DOS apps on Concurrent DOS 286.

So DR pivoted: it turned CDOS 286 into FlexOS, an RTOS that happened to have some DOS compatibility. It turned GEM into X/GEM, a multitasking version that could use the underlying OS's multitasking.

(ViewMax on DR-DOS 6 can manage multitasking full-screen DOS sessions using DR's TaskMAX multitasker.)

FlexOS with X/GEM evolved into many forms, and was sold by Siemens and many other companies, as an embedded control RTOS for all kinds of hardware.

The last ones on sale were for cash registers -- PC-based point-of-sale tills. IBM 4690 OS was still on sale in the 2000s, and it's based on DR FlexOS and X/GEM, with app development in Java that displays in a GUI that was a remote descendant of GEM.

Toshiba still supports it.

https://commerce.toshiba.com/wps/portal/marketing/?urile=wcm...

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#373

Post by lproven »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #353
rmason wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast. For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3…

GEM was very much an incomplete project, is my take on it. Which makes sense when you consider DR had to be -- seemingly for the life of the company -- pretty scrappy. Once Windows was on the scene, there was no point in them dumping a boatload of resources into it. Its original advocate and designer, Lee Lorenzen, left DR to go create his own startup and make Ventura Publisher (which shipped with its own copy of GEM…

Yup.

Nemanja Trifunovic's recent history is pretty good, I thought.

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#374

Post by lproven »

washingupliquid wrote: post #239
pjc50 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years?

On the desktop? No.

In human-computer interaction? The multitouch UI using a capacitative touchcreen, as used in the iPhone (2007, so 19 years ago) and iPad (2010).

This redefined how UIs work, so yeah, it's vastly significant.

The trouble is that now there's a whole generation of developers and desighers who literally grew up with it and its imitations, and they're trying to apply its "simplicity" to desktop WIMP GUIs. In the process they are removing things like, you know, the "M" of WIMP (whether it's "mouse" or "menu") because they don't see it as important.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#375

Post by lproven »

washingupliquid wrote: post #306
engeljohnb wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? That thing Windows has where you can drag a window to the top of the desktop and it pops up a few quick options for resizing. I would love it if KDE Plasma had this.

I'm fairly certain (an earlier iteration of) that came out in Windows Vista which is nearly 20 years ago. It was called Aero Snap.

Released November 8 2006, so not yet 20Y old... quite...

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#376

Post by lproven »

zozbot234 wrote: post #325
thesuitonym wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titlebar buttons are actually bad. The titlebar exists (or existed) for a reason, so you'd have somewhere you could grab to manipulate the window. Now it's kind of a guessing game with every app on where you can grab without causing the app to do something you didn't want.

If they do it correctly there's plenty of free space in the titlebar for grabbing. That's how it works in GTK+3 and later for example.

But it causes cognitive overhead: you need to think about which bits of the title-cum-button bar are safe to grab, as opposed to which overloaded and do other things, which are possibly useful.

I use Firefox. I also use macOS a lot. Firefox assumes your tabs are horizontal. Mine are not (using a built in feature).

So it doesn't use the title bar much. So there's an option to turn it off. It's off by default. Result, the actual top bar is a cluttered toolbar and it's hard to move the Firefox window.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#377

Post by lproven »

boobsbr wrote: post #331
sharts wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win2K was peak windows.

98 SE or XP SP2.

Nope, I am with @sharts here.

In my then job we called Win98 "GameOS" and I have zero nostalgia for it and the horrid IE4 "Active Desktop". Yuck.

By XP the rot and bloat were getting serious.

W2K was the peak. All downhill since.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#378

Post by lproven »

WillAdams wrote: post #204
masfuerte wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RISC OS (1987) had built-in support for anti-aliased vector fonts, though they aren't shown in the screenshot. The OS was in ROM and had insufficient space for the actual fonts so they needed to be loaded from disk. This was fine if you had a hard disk but a pita with floppies.

Need to find the time to try that out on a Raspberry Pi....

You really do. It is pretty much a work of art.

I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse.

2022:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3...

2024:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open...

I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, because that's all anyone on board has seen or knows.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#379

Post by spider-mario »

BoppreH wrote: post #119
spider-mario wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. Not always positive. The form briefly loses focus for two seconds (while you open your password manager or whatever) and you are shouted at to “PLEASE ENTER A VALID USERNAME” in red.

Sometimes I see it complaining _on every keypress_. Certainly annoying, but much better than the old "invalid field" red text at the very bottom, leaving you to scroll back up and guess what's wrong.

Incidentally, I’ve just come across this: https://www.threads.com/@miraklemax/post/DYRiyECFq2e

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#380

Post by lproven »

Terr_ wrote: post #8

> DECWindows > /tmp/med_16.sixel ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? If so, then that's certainly a very different way of feeling old than I expected when clicking the link. P.S.: There's another in "RiscOS 3.71", and "System V Release 4 Amiga Version 1.1" references Penny Arcade. [0] [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch#

> ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird?

Yes it is.

I still read the comic, but it is very strange and unpleasant, really actively nasty, now: currently it's in an arc of why Jews are behind all the world's problems, and how Hitler was good really.

I am sort of staring in daily horrified fascination. It's like a slow-motion catastrophic road crash.

What the hell happened to a Japanese American to turn them full Nazi? I mean like real "the Germans were wronged, they had the right idea" Nazi?

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