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Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#52

Post by pjc50 »

adrianwaj wrote: post #43
xnorswap wrote: post #30

This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years. Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.

I am starting to think the top half of the screen should be the desktop, the bottom half should be the start menu but already activated and full of programs. No conventional bottom panel-bar with a start button. A right-most column should exist that fills up with a list of opened windows. [1] When I first saw Win95 with a cleared desktop, I immediately thought - where has everything gone? Why is this empty? Decades l…

Screen real estate is precious unless on the very largest screens. Especially vertical. I'm a big fan of being able to put the app list/bar on the right, keeping the maximum vertical space available and allowing its captions to be readable horizontally.

> Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify?

This feels like the result of a competition to design the worst possible user interface. To about 5% of people it might be an accessibility feature, to everyone else it's worse, and people with beards, marks, or dark skinned faces are going to find it a disaster.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#53

Post by ori_b »

piekvorst wrote: post #51

No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).

The plan 9 interface has evolved quite a bit, but it's largely invisible in screenshots. The differences are in things like triple click behavior, jumps to insertion points, effective use of mouse cursor warping, chording.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#55

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

Can't help noticing how the interface and general mechanics of these old OSes were tightly coupled to the hardware. Both the makers and users of that era seemed to relish that vibe. I know I certainly do.

However, that paradigm made computers daunting for anyone who wasn't an enthusiast. While I’m nostalgic for that level of transparency, I recognize that those hurdles stood in the way of mass adoption.

We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact.

THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency.

Modern simplification shouldn't feel like a forced lobotomy of the OS (or any piece of software really). There’s no reason we can't have both: an interface that stays out of the way for the average user, while providing total control for power users.

Whatever happened to progressive disclosure?

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#56

Post by hermitcrab »

sthuck wrote: post #39

I kinda miss that in the early 2000's kde and gnome shipped with a fuck ton of window decorations based on all those (then-not-so) old OS. Teenager me had fun switching them every day and playing with windowing behavior (focus follows mouse! hover to select and only one click needed!). I wonder what techy kids today do to explore and have fun. Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I apprecia…

Yes Aqua was quite striking. Also much more consistent than the rag bag of different styling you see on Windows or Mac today.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#58

Post by hermitcrab »

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

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.

Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

#59

Post by anthk »

hermitcrab wrote: post #54

Invisible scroll bars are a source of constant annoyance. And it sometimes takes me several attempts to move a window, because of all the various clickable things without visible boundaries. Frustrating.

On GNU/Linux run this command, it will fix it for all the GTK based desktops, such as XFCE, Gnome and Mate:

               gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false
Under Mac you might have a similar Cocoa setting or whatever is called (nsproperties?) with "defaults write".
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