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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#391

Post by saltcured »

Quitschquat wrote: post #322
mc32 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.

Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.

Heh, I still remember how, as undergrads, we thought we all wanted those "pizza box" workstations that grad student were using.

But when I was assigned an Ultra (1?) workstation at my first full-time job, I found that it was a better user and development experience to ignore it and use Linux on my Dell notebook, which I think was a Pentium MMX running somewhere around 200 MHz.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#392

Post by saltcured »

foobarbecue wrote: post #135
Liftyee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc. Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.

When reading a document in a browser, I rely on the scrollbar to know things like: how long is it? Where am I in the document? How much of the document is on my screen right now? This is critical for decisions like: "Should I read the whole thing?" and for building a mental map of the whole document. I use the scrollbar to scroll between parts of the document if I need to flick back and forth quickly, say between the…

Yeah, I could literally accept a non-clickable "scroll gauge" to be there all the time that will not be a click/drag target.

I can generate scroll events or use keys like HOME/PGUP/PGDN/END or even search forward/back via keyboard to jump around. And I also suffer when a slightly misplaced click causes a disorienting scroll instead of hitting some other interaction target near the window edge.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#393

Post by saltcured »

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…

My flashback from this is that the early 90s should have some Linux/Xfree86/FVWM screenshots where there are NASA images of the comet Shoemaker-Levy, probably displayed with 'xv' in a psuedocolor graphics mode.

I feel like every geek I knew was downloading NASA images (at slow modem rates) back then.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#394

Post by mananaysiempre »

pell wrote: post #71
mananaysiempre wrote: post #18

Where did the author get a copy of pre-X-integration NeWS, I wonder (if indeed they did). I haven’t been able to locate one online after a lot of determined searching, but I also can’t bring myself to declare that there isn’t one because the name is so ungoogleable.

Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet? https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/

I have now, but (especially with the article part of the website now killed in favour of the execrable Medium) it took 'DVRC’s reply above for me to realize there was more to it than it first appeared: besides

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/

there’s also

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/

(take care that the news-tape subdirectory of the former is very similar but not identical to the latter)

and most notably

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/NeWS/

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/

(these are not identical either),

while the correct place to look on Bitsavers is

https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#395

Post by bartread »

julenx wrote: post #327
bartread wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There's something about those 80s and 90s interfaces with their visible affordances, grab points, etc., that just makes them instantly comprehensible. Many of them are also beautiful. The absolute peak, for me, though are those early releases of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma were both incredible, both in appearance, and in use. They looked fantastic but they still had all the affordances and comprehensibility of…

In Mac I use: defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true in order to enable dragging windows via `Cmd + Ctrl + Click`.

YOU are awesome - thank you, that's a great tip!

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#396

Post by gmmachine »

zuzululu wrote: post #294

im just scrolling through these while I prepare for a VC pitch session and I realize these UI are actually pretty darn good ? Like the old Windows 98 UI (probably biased) to me just handles so much, why can't apps just look like that? Its boring sure but there's no complexity or inferred action there like modern apps ? Why do seniors struggle to use modern mobile phones but in those days they could easily work throug…

Interesting take. Having said that, did you ever try and use workbench in Amiga?

Yet, I remember being around in the 90s and helping seniors navigate Windows98. While it was Windows 98 offered an easier UI/UX than 3.1, was it really superior over the UI/UX of modern interfaces and application design?

I too dislike Mac interfaces, and think that KDE is likely the best UI ever. While on KDE, lets include the also German, and now discontinued, YaST over Windows98 control panel!

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#397

Post by plun9 »

lproven wrote: post #367
plun9 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://nixon-development.com/guis

Thanks! Is it me or do 3/4 of the pages not load any images? The title took me a moment to work out. I suppose it was written by someone who speaks in an accent where "OS-some" sounds like "awesome". It does not to me. It was 20 or 30 years after the last time I saw a Hauppuage TV card that I saw an explanation of how it's meant to be pronounced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauppauge_Computer_Works Then some years…

The links at the left and the image links do work.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#398

Post by kalleboo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #233
whartung wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 display…

What's funny is there was third-party software that would enable it on the Mac, Apple could have done it far earlier than MacOS X.

1993 PowerBook 145B (25 MHz 68030) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQo29SIIgU

1994 PowerBook 540c (33 MHz 68040) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peWIysrf7DY this one is a bit chunkier in the video recording than real life since enabling the external video visibly slows the graphics down

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#399

Post by lproven »

WillAdams wrote: post #383
lproven wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bec…

For me, my high-water mark for GUI experience/consistency was using Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS on an NCR-3125 when mobile, and a NeXT Cube (w/ a Wacom ArtZ) when at my desk --- nothing since has been as nice and consistent and reliable.

I believe you.

I never touched a real PenPoint device, sadly. I never got to use a real NeXT cube -- they were formidably expensive over on my side of the Atlantic, the price of a _high end_ new car before I could afford a car at all.

I own an original copy of NeXTstep with manuals and have run it inside Previous, but it's not the same.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#400

Post by lproven »

zozbot234 wrote: post #390
lproven wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

If there'a a visible title label, that's obviously safe for grabbing. Firefox is probably doing it wrong by not leaving some visible space for users to grab at things.

> Firefox is probably doing it wrong

Up to a point -- although Mozilla added vertical tabs about a year ago, it's pretty clear nobody uses them, same as nobody left at Microsoft is competent enough at customising a Windows desktop to know how to use vertical taskbars, so they removed that option from Win11.

But saying that, although I do not like GNOME, I review the new version every 6 months, so I do try it. I find the same problem with GNOME CSD apps.

It is not confined to the problem of moving windows. The GNOME developers are clearly obsessed with gestures -- even the welcome tour contains instructions on trackpad gestures, and my machines have the trackpads disabled. I use mice, because I prefer them.

With a mouse on Linux, the middle-button has 4 main functions:

1. Open web links in a new background tab.

2. Middle-click the title bar to push the window behind other windows.

3. Middle-click in text to insert the currently-selected text at the cursor.

4. Close browser tab.

I do these things hundreds of times a day. Literally, no hyperbole.

GNOME has removed functions #2 and #3.

From this it seems apparent to me that the GNOME developers do not really know how to use mice effectively, and mainly use laptops with trackpads.

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