Yep even the later ones. I used to sit in front of a Solaris CDE desktop locked in a basement. Made me want to slit my wrists. The colour scheme, how it worked, the peformance. All horrible.
I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.
Ooo, a rare fellow home RISC OS user! I had an A3000 at home myself so I didn't have the benefit of using RISC OS with a hard drive, and we never upgraded to an ARM3, but we did use both RISC OS 2 and 3.
Still love the old Acorn machines. I mostly use Arculator[0] nowadays for that nostalgia though.
Brilliant. Yeah there were a few of us back in the day! Had an A440 then a RiscPC 700 here. Hard disk made all the difference even if it was only a 40MB one!
I have a local version of RPCemu too, but I never had a Risc PC myself so it's not as interesting to me; we got a PC about half a year after Windows 95 released.
Have you come across the Stardot[0] community yet? I feel like you'd enjoy it. Fair warning: it's more focused on the Acorn computers themselves (both 8-bit and 26/32-bit) than the continuing development of RISC OS. That said, I personally think it's great.
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.
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.
I'm on Windows and Mac. Not because I love them, but because that is where my customers are. Also I try to keep my computers fairly vanilla, so that they don't look too different to the user's computer when I do videos or screenshots of my software.
Report as bug. A surprising number of (commercial or open source) projects care about accessibility settings
Of course, a smaller but no less surprising number of projects don't. The complexity of such a report is so low, though, that one might as well try for software that you actually use
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 here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. 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. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.
> 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 low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast.
The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.
Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day.
> 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.
Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor?
I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".
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
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 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on.
> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations.
Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original.
Which is what led to FreeMINT and TOS 4, and the desire for a FOSS distro of that is what led to AFROS.
> You can even run MagiC on Linux now
Oh! I knew he'd open-sourced it. I did mention MagiC in passing in my follow-up to Nemanja's history:
Being in the North American sphere and distinctly post-Atari by the mid 90s, I didn't really know about MagiC until much later. It's pretty amazing what he built!
Too bad it's 100% assembler. Though very nicely written assembler.
Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched. I am tempted to point an LLM at the MagiC sources and have it port to Coldfire :-)
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). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.)
On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.
> 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.
Notably, NeXT scrollbars were also on the left edge of the window, the logic being that (at least for left-to-right languages) most people focus on the left side of the document more often. I remember liking it.
I wonder why Apple swapped back to the right-hand scrollbars with OS X. I guess just because that's what classic MacOS and nearly everyone else did.
1. There were far more users of the classic Mac OS than there were users of NeXTstep/OPENSTEP. Mac OS X has many of OPENSTEP’s underpinnings, but it wasn’t OPENSTEP 5.0; it was Mac OS X, a continuation of the Mac but with new underpinnings. The interface was different enough to represent a new direction for the Mac but without turning the Mac UI/UX into that of NeXT.
2. At the time NeXTstep was under development (mid-late 1980s), the case law surrounding UI look-and-feel and how much borrowing and inspiration one could have before it became infringing wasn’t settled. Apple had lawsuits with Digital Research and Microsoft over whether GEM and Windows infringed on the Macintosh’s look-and-feel. Recall that NeXT was formed after Steve Jobs’ failed coup at Apple against then-CEO John Sculley. Apple sued NeXT due to Jobs’ poaching of key Apple employees who worked with him on the Macintosh and allegations that NeXT was going to use Apple’s intellectual property (in some ways NeXT could be thought of as the evolution of the “Big Mac” project Steve Jobs worked on before his departure). They ended up settling out of court, but given Apple’s litigious nature and given the history of how NeXT came to be, it was very wise for NeXTstep to feature a UI/UX that was a radical departure from the Macintosh. While I don’t think a lawsuit about right-hand scroll bars would succeed, having them on the left helps defend against allegations that NeXTstep ripped off the Mac.
I wonder if it's righthanded mouse users? I'm using a vertical ergo mouse beneath my monitor, and your comment made me realize that it's quite similar to if I just.. reached for the scrollbar and pulled it. As opposed to having to cross the whole screen, metaphorically.
There's also the distraction factor. Maybe having the bar moving on the left edge competes with moving from line to line, and the general anchoring edge of the F shaped reading pattern.
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.
There is an SGI IRIX screenshot there from late 90’s. I scanned the list to take a look specifically for it.
I once saw 4 of the SGI Onyx2 RealityMonster supercomputers in a post-production house’s render farm in London.
They were so expensive, ($1m+ per computer) that it was only financially viable if they were engaged on client work 24/7/365. Damn gorgeous things and they turned the display of those into almost an art piece for wow-ing film studio execs.
Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.
That was my first GUI, on the Commodore 64 with RAM expansion (don't remember if I had the 128kb or 256kb expansion). I wrote and laid out my user group newsletter on GeoPublish. I felt like I was running a Mac.
I only know it existed because on Portugal, Phillips had an option to ship GeoWorks instead of Windows on their PCs, and a guy on our class was very adamant defending it.
It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences
but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+.
It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered.
Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.
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 seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab
Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
> 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 Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn.
It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
I was trying to use Orca Slicer (which itself is intractable) and it had a combo button whose menu was disconnected from the button. The menu would disappear as soon as the cursor left the button boundary, but because it was disconnected, there was no way to get to the menu without leaving the button boundary, traveling a void, and then getting to the menu. I’m unsure what incantation allowed me to finally choose the right command, but forget how it looks, it was if no one even tried to see if it works.
Most fun is when the menu opens both on button hover and on button press, but if the menu already opened, clicking the button closes it instead, so the first 2-3 you use it, you end up opening the panel and closing it immediately.
Not sure how stuff like this gets deployed in the first place, guess we're just a few people left who test things we develop before we push them to the public, I'd rather believe that than that people just don't care anymore...
I feel like the modern web/app ecosystems have forced developers onto a red queen type treadmill, so software never really matures. They often build up to 70% of the features they want, the codebase gets intractable because of all the crap they have to deal with and they start over.
I love software like Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, etc, that matured over decades and kept their soul.
There are still UX research. It's just that the collective "we" has changed and we can/may build on some existing design decisions.
You are always designing something with a target audience in mind, and the next, e.g. mobile phone will very likely be used by someone who has interacted briefly with a similar device, so you may re-use some already learnt patterns.
The very early UXs built heavily on desktop metaphors (like folders), but at this point many (and an increasing number of) people are more familiar with OS UI n-1 than a typical office setting.
So I don't think jumping to this conclusion is correct - there are well-designed software, it has just become much much cheaper to create new ones, so the average quality has necessarily went down.
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 "..."
Yes, two.
Incidentally I was looking for how to delete a file, which is now deliberately missing from the object's context menu, and intentionally hidden under one of these.
A few weeks ago I was co-hosting a live coding session (in front of a crowd, it was pretty collaborative, back-and-forth).
I had to authorize something with Firebase, for which I had to auth with Google, for which I had to do a MFA with my (Pixel) phone.
Usually it's "are you trying to auth" and finger-to-the-scanner, but around that time this particular way didn't work. It also didn't want to send me a text or a call to auth me.
No, I had to find an OTP code. Easy, right? Wrong. The instructions, and the docs, don't match where it was in that particular version of Android, and there were a bunch of blind alleys that were named basically the same.
It took me like 10 minutes, on stage, browsing my phone (thankfully, not casted to screen) to find the friggin' option. Thankfully the cohost was doing the presenting at that time, but it was pretty lousy.
And this is using Google's OS on a Google phone doing a Google auth flow for a Google property. And I'm a techie who's been using Android for 15+ years now. And I did the exact same dance a few weeks before that - also so roundabout I had no idea how I stumbled on the correct page.
User experience my ass.
PS. The regular "are you trying to sign in?" flow works again. No idea what happened - wasn't me.
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 ..."
But if we didn’t use ••• menus everywhere then some parts of the UI might be cLuTtErEd!!! The worst sin of computing.
To think that we used to trust mere mortals - without even a signing certificate or developer membership - with the power to customize every toolbar in a Microsoft application, and to set every font and color for the whole UI of the system. People made their computer environments ugly in some cases. And it was fine, because they owned those freaking computers, so who the heck has any business telling them not to?
Sorry, clearly it bugs me a lot how much we’ve lost.
It's not just what we've lost, it's an incredible disservice to "non-nerds" - old DOS programs may have been annoying and cluttered, but everything was right there and more importantly, it didn't change so you could learn what you needed and just work with it.
We could go back and forth on things like "the ribbon" being better or worse, but the fact that it changes depending on window size is an incredible sin. Hello, everyone! Learn how to click a tiny 5x5 pixel arrow or lose your menu items forever!
It's like a compromise was made at some point where they decided that in order to get what they predicted would be slightly higher adoption, it's okay to usher in a world where most consumer-facing software is essentially impossible to become a 'power user' of, because of abridged ('decluttered') functionality, lack of keyboard shortcuts, extreme lag caused by excessive animation, and a UI that changes for fashion reasons every few months.
I look at retail for examples of this. If you watch an experienced cashier who interacts with a system all day, they have perfect muscle memory of the keyboard or keypad, and operate it so fast that you would have to ask them to slow down to understand what they're doing.
Now many of those have been replaced with touchscreens, which are noticeably worse -- since the UI is never fast, you have to stop and wait for the next UI to appear after many of the steps, instead of letting the keyboard buffer do it for you, which worked great on a decades-old system. But, I assume the companies who allowed that replacement believed it was worth it to be able to onboard a new cashier just a bit quicker, with a UI that looks just like the iPads that they were raised on, complete with big unlabeled icons and "three lines" or "•••" buttons.
I’m always reminded of the old text UIs at Fry’s Electronics - a salesman could slam in all the keystrokes necessary to print your pick slip before the screen had even finished loading the first inventory. It was pretty impressive.
Meanwhile I live in a world where opening five Salesforce tabs locks them all up.
The UI wouldn't be cluttered if the keys on the...keyboard...did stuff. Now that vibe-coding has broken me out of my decades-long irrational fear of GUI programming, I've recently been circling back on all the UI patterns I have just accepted. One missing one is all those F1...F12 keys. I remember those doing stuff in the DOS days. I fantasize about a computer where the menus are at the bottom of the screen and line up with the Fn keys on the keyboard. I know...it might be possible for even grandma to figure that one out.
Arguably the trend to touchscreens could have given a lot of help to the novice user by having labeled buttons - onscreen FKeys if you will. But we seem to have used touchscreens to show pictures fullscreen, with controls that disappear until you swipe or touch something just the right way.
Fkeys are arguably a huge tragedy, here we have keys, twelve of them, that could have been used for simple one-fingered operation, but they were put to use pretty sparingly for a long time (basically F2 and Alt-F4 were the only common ones most people used, with F1 for Help and F11 often used for Full Screen as honorable mention) so the laptop manufacturers reused them, leading to a world where they go from being the easiest and best keyboard shortcut keys, to one of the worst, since you probably need to teach people how to find and use a 'Fn' key to use them.
Touchscreen UIs definitely could be made a lot better. For example, long-press has always annoyed me. Why isn't there a modifier button that allows selecting the interaction mode before touching (e.g. a mode button separate from the thing being clicked on, that can also be clicked on with one finger)? Similarly, wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to know, before clicking, what a button might do, and whether that could be undone? Steep, steep asks, I know.
I’d love to use those keyboards that can light keys to flash the key combo for the menu items.
It seems now it’s not worth learning the keystrokes because everything is a website or changes randomly. Ah, for the days when Excel supported Lotus 1-2-3 shortcut mode for decades.
> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this.
Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.
Thank you for posting this. I have enabled them at home and work. I am really tired of having to look for a window's shadow to resize it. Which is problematic when you run a black desktop.
Having to resize a window by grabbing it just outside the visible border is so wrong.
"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"."
With desktop OS I feel a lot of designers don't know how to use them. They grew up with phones and never use a desktop OS outside of work.
> based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
It's worthwhile to note that this was not just research in a vacuum, but a lot of user studies where they literally watched and studied people using the software and how they were confused, found or didn't find functionality, etc. Lots of interviews, talking to people, boiling things down to how actual people struggled with the software.
One example of a UI being a result of research seems to be Windows 98. Much of the surface is gray, and a lot of the text is black. It might look boring, but that is how you get to use a little colour for things that need accent, and it will make a difference. Also in a factory, the walls are gray, but the fire extinguisher is red so that you can hardly miss it.
> opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them
The latest design of interfaces is designed by people who have barely used a desktop computer and have no idea of the conventions or advanced usage. They create terrible UIs because they have no idea what a good UI is and they often don't even use the product they create.
> 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.
You are so very spot on with this. All of it. Literally nothing is better in the UI world in the past 20 years. Zero. We already had multitouch scrolling on laptops back then.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the problem can be traced back to the transition to Mobile first design. The motivations were arguably pretty innocent in general. If there were no downsides, it’s nice that there isn’t a separate code base and an entirely separate set of capabilities for desktop and little 5-inch phone screens. However, the way that we have achieved that - nearly across the board - is by lobotomizing the experience everywhere.
And because of fashion (those artists who control the UX can’t resist it), even in places where that doesn’t even make any sense because there is no mobile version (say, B2B SaaS products that only get used on a desktop), they still feel the need to cosplay as a mobile app by using all the same stupid design elements (the ••• and “hamburger” menus, the giant grids of “tiles” that should have been a table, etc.
That's basically the curse. Fucking fashion. If that human concept wouldn't exist, UIs today would be way way better. But no, we have to keep changing it forever and with each iteration worse and worse. UI enshittification at its pinnacle.
> 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.
idk, i think your underestimating the ubiquity and resources behind stuff like A/B and usability testing nowadays. Certainly a much more sophisticated way of determining whether people are able to find what they need.
> 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.
Double-click came out of Xerox's research park. Apply might have been the first to put that into a popular desktop PC solution, but it wasn't their design any more than the rest of the system they copied. There are arguments that a second button was a much better idea, but that would still not be immediately discoverable and even with many buttons in modern solutions we _still_ have double-clicking.
Minor correction - Xerox knew they could not commercialise their invention so they wanted someone to take it off their hands. So Apple didn't copy - they paid for it (in stock, not cash) - and if you've ever used a Smalltalk environment you'll know that what Apple actually shipped (in the Lisa and then the Mac) is a _lot_ of work done over the top of what Xerox had.
I've always heard it came from Xerox PARC, but even if it originated at Apple, it would have been one of their OS devs. It's nuts how the cult of Steve Jobs leads some to label him as the inventor of everything.
My pet peeve is spacing. My usual resolution is 1920x1080 (scaled or not) and it feels I could cram more information in an old 1024x768 desktop. You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
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 clarity improved significantly. But I also sacrificed usable space because apps don't adjust, everything is just made larger.
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.
>> You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
At work I use 1 or 2 monitors plus the laptop screen (on Windows). At home I just use a single 55" 4K TV for my monitor and place apps center, left, right, and up top for rarely used stuff (on Linux). The desktop metaphor always wanted a big display but you're right - most Windows apps expect a full 1920x1080 for themselves.
Same here. The Teams meeting page layout pisses me off on a regular basis, with way too much useless space around everything, tons of unhideable icons and crap filling half the screen, and all the actual content crammed into a little box. I'm sitting here with a 4K 27" monitor and all that space and resolution is just wasted. Yeah you can work around it, but what a PITA.
For the brief time I used Windows 11 the amount of times I placed a window over another and then clicked on the wrong window because I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended was absolutely ridiculous.
I'm afraid that the core of the problem is something far more simple and fundamental.
The people designing desktop apps today simply never learned the conventions that make desktop applications good. They grew up with smartphone apps, web apps, electron apps, games, etc.
In fact, you can observe from things like JavaFX, Flutter, WPF, etc., that the trend has long been about the ability of easily creating custom widgets like you could with Javascript (or Flash), rather than the convenience of having a library of widgets that look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system.
"I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended "
Sometimes I am starting to feel like how my dad looked many years ago when I tried to teach him how to use Windows. He simply couldn't see the window borders. With the latest designs I am reaching this point too. I am struggling moving and resizing windows because I can't tell where the border is.
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.
Even back when we had much fewer pixels on most displays, people knew 1px drag targets were a bad idea. Some UIs dos have single pixel borders, but tended to have extra decorations at the corners so there was something larger to interact with there, and/or implemented something like a control key making any point in the window a size/move target.
> look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system
Which is what? Windows natively has like 4 official looks. You can click around the 2 (!) settings programs and pop open windows for basically every framework windows has created (and deprecated) in the last 2 decades.
We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc.
But we did gain some nice things!
- Tabs.
- Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.
- Document editors remembering unsaved changes.
- Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
- Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings (we need more of those).
- Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc).
- Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`).
- Map widgets, a small miracle we take for granted.
- Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.
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 that's a problem for you, you have much to gain with better window management shortcuts. On KDE I have the Windows key + left click set to drag a window from anywhere, and win + right click to resize depending on the quadrant the cursor is on. It's incredibly satisfying not having to hunt titlebar empty spaces or thin edges.
My main interaction tool with the system is the pointer. Reaching out for the keyboard is something I do when I want to type, but for example when I am consuming content on my computer I just keep a single hand on the mouse or the trackpad. In that case shortcuts are just plain annoying.
On KDE, something nice is that if you have a maximized window and a panel on the top of the screen, I can drag that panel to grab the window (or maybe it was a setting of Latte dock or something). And since window titlebars nowadays can be cluttered with buttons, it is a predictable way to grab those windows only using the mouse.
But do you see that title bar buttons are bad explicitly because you have to hunt for title bar edges?
That you were more or less forced to adopt these KDE shortcuts so that you could work around the fact that they had cannibalized the title bar for a purpose it was not designed for.
You were forced to change your workflow and everybody else is having to be forced to adapt because they changed a metaphor that has remained stable on the desktop for over 40 years
The arguments in this thread-- amounting to "it's a good general practice because I happen to like it" (rather than "it is a sane / discoverable / usable default") are precisely demonstrating why these issues exist.
UX design is treated as a subjective matter, as if it is equally valid to clearly label UI elements as it is to have magic, nondescript UI pixels that serve as vital control surfaces.
Go watch videos of the research Xerox did on UI/UX and HCI in general, and weep for what we have lost...
I already weep deeply for what we have lost, and what we cannot imagine, and what we can imagine and build but nobody would use because they are too ignorant to learn and adapt.
My argument for the titlebar is that it was at least researched UI/UX convention done by Apple/IBM/Microsoft at the nascence of personal computing. These are the primitives that arose from that research.
It is not out of what I happen to like that I argue this. I personally am deeply frustrated by cursor-y window controls. I much prefer a tiled interface with a top menu bar and copious keyboard shortcut compositions. I, if I could, would Never use the mouse, and if I needed axial control for a 3d environment would prefer to use an analog stick of some sort. Unfortunately those are not the conventions we have for general computing, especially in the workplace.
We are in general forced to use the conventions given to us by the major OS providers. One of those used to be the titlebar, with which you could use the cursor to control the window. The insistence of the current tech industry to shove any button they like up there without regard for these conventions that have been set for decades (and were in many cases of this sin set by their company: M∫/M$ --the integral symbol is a slop 'S') is causing real economic harm in terms of lost productivity from broken muscle memory and wasted actions
I wasn't forced to adopt tho, these shortcuts go back to when Windows had chunky borders in XP/7. It was just something that a lot of Linux WMs did and it's incredibly useful so I found ways to do the equivalent on all operating systems.
Also KDE seems pretty staunchly _against_ client-side decorations with buttons other than the window manager buttons.
> You were forced to change your workflow and everybody else is having to be forced to adapt because they changed a metaphor that has remained stable on the desktop for over 40 years
All of the "positive" items I listed come with drawbacks. I didn't realize I might be in the minority for this one, since I genuinely prefer the new workflow.
The old ways supported both keyboard and mouse workflows, on purpose. There was no reason to collapse the titlebar except for the unfortunate time when 16:9 monitors were forced on us and vertical space became precious. A time thankfully that is over.
Today I have one 3:2 and one portrait monitor so compacted titlebars are particularly poor design.
Thankfully KDE for the most part does not indulge in that, and let’s you fix window borders, but they have other failures such as hard coded button order in dialogs.
fwiw, when I'm on an OpenBSD desktop, I use cwm which doesn't supply titlebars, and I use Meta+click to move windows. That's great...On OpenBSD. But sometimes I'm using a Windows computer. Sometimes I'm using a Mac.
...And sometimes I'm using OpenBSD, so titlebar buttons introduce a titlebar I didn't want, and didn't need, which doesn't match the rest of my desktop customizations.
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.
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.
> 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!!!!!
> 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.
Tabs aren't really new: look at BeOS which could "tab" windows..
That said I agree with you that tab are really nice, especially the way VSCode manage them with the vertical list of opened files (I switched from vim to VSCode due to this feature).
There is a very practical reason for this; most GUI apps are webapps (whether local or not is irrelevant), and the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
There might have been worse ways to design the fetch API, but off-hand, I can't think of any - what came before it was immensely better for a user experience.
With a better API we could have a progress bar that goes through the TCP/IP stack: advance when the domain is resolved, when a handshake is finished, when the request is sent, when the response starts streaming back, when the response finishes.
It'd be a very jumpy bar, but it helps develop intuitions. "The first part is always slower on this machine", "when it gets stuck on this spot I need to reset my router", "this part will be slow because the request is large", etc.
Most of the time you're fetching multiple things in parallel and you could show a progress of how many of those are done (perhaps weighted by estimated size). That's essentially the way many progress bars work.
>> the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).
>> As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
> This is a failure of whatever framework the web dev is leaning on instead of actually programming the computer.
There was a brief moment in history where we had the best of both worlds.
I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha).
We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
I don't miss the loading bar. The progress in the bar never seems to correlate well with the actual time taken. It's not uncommon to have a progress bar breeze through the first half in seconds and spend minutes on the later half or vice versa. It's misleading to the point I recall "progress bar stuck on 99%" became a meme before people started calling them memes.
Just give me the option to view a log of what is happening under the hood. Tell me which step of the process you are at, what files are you copying etc.
None of the gains you list have anything to do with user interfaces. They would all or mostly be possible in any of the older desktop environments shown.
The screenshots in the post include many old applications, sometimes jarring to modern sensibilities. I think it's fair to have a discussion here about the evolution of application UI too, no?
Yes. The macOS menu bar is also searchable, which is cool. Unity on Ubuntu also had this back in the day.
Most people haven't experienced "addressable interfaces" like Emacs and don't know what they're missing when they only have visuospatial navigability. I would like to see searching and jumping make bigger impacts in mainstream UX design.
Probably! To quote William Gibson, "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". I'm sure you can find some of these features all the way back in The Mother of All Demos, the difference now is that they're more common.
One of my biggest bugbears is losing the OK/Apply/Cancel concept with dialog boxes or settings windows. If I have a window with lots of settings that I want to experiment with then I've no problem with that setting taking effect immediately, but please give me the ability to back out all the changes I've tentatively made via a Cancel button.
I have a feeling you're in the minority. I've been using computers for 35+ years and I feel like I still don't understand OK/Apply/Cancel buttons. I still click Apply before clicking OK even if I know it's unnecessary.
Plus, I don't believe Cancel reverts changes the user made if they clicked Apply already. So your suggestion would go against how the UX of OK/Apply/Cancel has historically worked.
Yeah, me too. The Amiga had a good idea with its Preferences programs (i.e. settings or options) - a "Use" button, which only saves to memory, separate from the "Save" button, which also saves to disk. So even if you make a mess of it, just reboot. Of course, in those days we were used to rebooting often, so that wasn't an issue. But if the idea had caught on, then by now we'd probably also have a "Revert" option that copies from disk to memory and activates it.
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 earlier interfaces.
One thing that's also very noticeable to me: title bars are title bars and nothing else. It's just easy to grab windows and move them, resize them, etc. Nowadays I really struggle sometimes to find a place in (what should be) the titlebar to drag a window in many application.
It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.
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 data and the interpretation, once I have that mental map and know where things roughly are.
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.
For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)
Until some dolt decides to build "infinite scroll" - I've seen dragging the scrollbar with the mouse cause JS exceptions to be thrown on some pages. One for the UI hall of shame.
I don't think I've seen a JS exception like that, but it drives me nuts when I'm dragging the scrollbar down for a quick scan of the page contents (especially if it's images or huge product tiles), and at some point it suddenly loads more in, scrolls down a chunk further before I can let go of the mouse button, and then I don't know where the hell I was.
For scrolling large distances in large documents, that's an important use case to me. As an indication of progress is another important use case, but also as an indication to show the size of the document relative to the viewport.
I don't think we've lost these things so much as our preferences have now become a minority where once we were the majority. It seems completely normal. With the barrier to entry dropping, designs now match what is appealing to the largest number. Linux DEs are still quite customizable, and we're fortunate that niche desires can still be met there.
Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.
SerenityOS is the most well known but it's a fully custom operating system of its own. For Linux you can install the chicago95 theme (includes a widget set for GTK+3) and the b00merang GTK+4 theme (doesn't help with excess padding unfortunately, but it still has proper high-contrast 3D for the widgets and color for the headerbar. The mobile-friendly responsive UX of new GTK+4 apps actually works great with the traditional 3D look.)
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:
Then some years later, I mentioned this to someone, and he said it aloud and I realised that my mental effort to pronounce "HAWP-og" was completely wrong. To me, it sounds something more like "whore-porg".
I'll be honest, 1053 might be my favourite xkcd comic ever, purely because it's so encouraging of sharing knowledge and learning new things. Always excided to see the lucky 10,000 mentioned in the wild.
It's one of my favourite things, looking at and analyzing older interfaces. Some are lovely, some are cute, some are ugly, but most are... "naïve"? I love to think about the effort, the research, the trials and tribulations. I feel I will spend a great deal of time in this page!
First and foremost to me those screenshots are somewhat disappointing as they can't match my memories. NeXT, BeOS, Irix, OpenLook, SunOS, Arthur (imagine the diversity)... they were SO awesomely impressive at insanely high multi-sync CRT resolution.
Reality simply can't match the mind's eye, at least not for me.
I was thinking exactly the same. IRIX on a great Sony CRT is still awesome to just look at, to this day (I have _few_ SGIs). HP Vue, Solaris.. the greats.
One that does seem to be an odd man out is Genera. What a concept.
The man behind this site is known for his skills of recoverying data from QIC tapes.
Looking at the "Software Library" section makes me always wonder if it will be released at some point, since that there is some stuff that isn't on BitSavers or other sites.
I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.
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 best new thing, whether it's systemd, pulseaudio, wayland or pipewire, but generally things work OK and it's not like Windows today offers a significantly different experience.
No thanks, I do not want Linux. I use Linux for my home servers and at work, and I'd like to keep it that way, at arm's length.
I don't know why people suggest Linux for desktop use at the first swoop. I dislike it. I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are, I dislike how edge cases that are handled straightforwardly on Windows just aren't on Linux. Things like high pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support, notebook battery life management, and more. The bazaar thing contributes to all of these sharp edges and jank.
And more importantly I dislike the sanctimony of the Linux community, I dislike the distribution and the linking model of most desktop distributions, I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first', unless a giant entity rewrites the entire user mode stack to provide a useful, straightforward, and mostly intuitive platform interface (that is, Android).
An OS is more than the kernel. It is the entire platform including user-mode libraries, toolkits, and applications. For all its faults, I find the Windows platform better than any Linux distro platform, except one.
> Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them.
What I listed aren't only hardware features; they are platform interfaces that can be programmed against to produce user-mode applications without having to muck around with kernel interfaces. In fact the less as a user or user-mode developer I have to work with the kernel, the better, and Windows provides a gigantic surface area for that.
I am happy with how Windows works, I like a Windows workflow, I like developing for and on Windows, I like gaming on Windows. I've used it for 26 years and broadly have no issues with it. It is a pretty superb platform which regressed after Windows 10, and about 99% of the problems with it are user-mode frameworks and applications, thin coats of paint. Windows isn't even close to 'beyond salvation'.
> I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first',
There are user-centric and dev-centric Linux distros. Windows is "Microsoft cloud onboarding" centric, and the experience has been dramatically degrading for years.
If that were not the case, why would senior executives at Microsoft say things like "we've heard you" and "we intend to reverse the suck in the coming year"? Even their management knows users hate the Win11 experience, and have placed it on their backlog....
> I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are...igh pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support
These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux. Out of the box I can output youtube videos to a dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon, which pulls up an interface reminescent of "Windows 7, when the mixer wasn't terrible".
The reasons not to use KDE these days are because you need Windows software (usually: edge, teams, Office), or especially because LibreOffice is terrible. The core desktop experience, however, is notably and demonstrably less jank than the mess that is Windows 11.
> These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux
They are not.
I use a KDE distribution at work. I regularly see GPU texture copy bugs like random lines across the middle of the display, or along the bottom edge. I use a 4K 144 Hz 16:9 display, and the Linux platform absolutely struggles with getting the scaling, resolution, and colour depth on all the dozens of GUI toolkits correct. Subpixel antialiasing doesn't work on many applications. It doesn't matter if I am using Wayland or X; both are bad experiences.
> dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon
Speaking of sound... Linux doesn't even pick up my Audient interface unless I physically reinsert the USB cable. It doesn't have a channel or volume control for audio feedback from my mic to my outputs. If I change the output volume slider down from 100%, the actual volume output is asymmetric—one channel is considerably louder than the other at 50%.
I have experienced issues with wpa_supplicant, iwd/iwctl, and systemd-networkd fighting each other. Why are there even so many network managers? Why does the platform not provide one?
I will disagree until the cows come home that any Linux desktop interface (again, bar Android... but like I said, Android is almost an entirely different platform) is less jank than Windows. People bring up Windows' old UIs, but said UIs still work. gpedit.exe, regedit.exe, msc.exe, services.exe, ncpa.cpl, perfmon.exe, windbg.exe, these are things that haven't changed in nearly 3 decades.
It is a pity that your Linux experience is spoiled by so many bugs. I just want to say that I'm using it for recent years and encountered none of the issues you mention. In fact, my overall experience is butter smooth, regarding hardware support.
Right now my laptop is connected to 4K Dell display and it works perfectly in clamshell mode. I never saw any random lines across the middle of display, GPU acceleration seems to work fine, WebGPU in my Chromium browser works fine, video decode accelerated so 4K video eats a tiny bit of CPU. I can't say anything regarding color depth, everything seems to work fine for me. My display reports "3840x2160, 60Hz 30bit" info. I'm using 2x scaling and fonts are rendered properly (not blurry) in all applications I'm using.
My WiFi is configured using NetworkManager, I don't have iwd installed and systemd-networkd is not enabled. It somewhat helps that I'm using Arch and I decide what to install and what to enable.
I agree that Android provides much more polished system and I'd be happy to switch to desktop Android if that ever will be a thing. I don't like Linux desktop. It's just the only desktop operating system that does not suck for me.
You're mentioning a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the UI, and also, when it comes to wifi, that most people don't have any problems with.
Android has a horrible interface.
I'm not a regular KDE user, but it's a different universe than a barely customizable interface filled with generational cruft with garbage over the top of it spitting ads at you, saving everything to the cloud, etc.
Most Linux desktops are quiet. They may be a little buggy at times, but Windows is just as buggy at times.
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 Web or Windows when those two will work forever, but on Linux you have to keep up with the endless treadmill of X11 to Wayland, GTK 2 to 3 to 4, Qt 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, pulseaudio to pipewire, etc., and if you miss just one you may as well give up.
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).
I would recommend WindowBlinds to achieve the "grey, boxy UI" look. As for a Windows 2000 theme out of the box, I am not sure, but I know it can make your Windows 10/11 UI look and behave like Windows XP.
There is a custom skin editor as well, so you can tailor the look of Windows to anything you choose, so you can probably get very close to the Windows 2000 look you are seeking.
Cheers. Some of the themes look pretty good! I used to use StarDock Start and StartIsBack back when I was using Windows 8 to, well, get the Windows 7 Aero theme and the start menu back.
That being said I do notice that many of the rounded corners aren't fully transparent...
> I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React
I know that you said "no React" but you might want to try ReactOS. Of course if you don't need Windows-specific driver support Linux+Wine might suffice for your needs.
ReactOS does not have the features that the parent specifically asked for (and that you quoted). It’s also far from being usable as a production OS.
What the parent wants doesn’t exist, it’s interesting to see people give suggestions for alternatives. It’s clear that their priority are these underlying features and they wish it had a boxy grey UI, not that the boxy grey UI is the only requirement and everything else is optional.
Windows 10 doesn’t have the UI that the parent is asking for. Windows 7 was the last one that had that. Windows 11 isn’t much different in terms of UI from Windows 10 after tweaking a couple of things.
I'm currently running Windows 10 Enterprise with a volume key from my alma mater. When I eventually upgrade to 11, either Server or LTSC is on my radar.
I dont know about Win11, but in Win10, it is still there. You can see it in MDI apps and, in a few rare circumstances, I have seen the window manager seemingly crash and flash the old Win2000-style boxy design before going back to what it currently does.
Microsoft is really good at supporting the old libraries and GUIs etc (is the Windows 3.11 font picker still there?) - the problem is that modern programs aren't built to the W2K paradigm so even if you force W11 to "look" like windows 2000 all the apps will not suddenly grow title bars, etc.
For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.
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 later I still think it's cumbersome to have to look and press at bottom left to see all the programs every time.
[1] proportions and locations can be set
Also, a "sweep" button that quickly clears the desktop into a "desktop archive." I do that manually anyway with my own "sweep" folders. Every few months I delete and categorize within the sweep folder. Keeping the desktop clean and organized is the new frontier, especially as screens become smaller and people don't want to lose flow.
Verbose response, but what are your thoughts? Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify?
Mice and keyboards are just so passe, right, but I wouldn't go so far as getting a brain chip? Maybe a spherical "touchball" that senses the pressure of each finger to move a cursor? Trackballs are too laborsome. I have my mouse on maximum sensitivity and acceleration anyway.
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.
> 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.
You say that, but I have seen in the wild a scroll gesture to increase or decrease the value of a telephone number.
Wasn't even capped at zero, so I could scroll to a negative (phone) number.
True, it's not a good solution and there is Subvocal Recognition (SVR) that detects electrical signals in the neck or jaw using pads. Hall effect keyboards are pretty good in terms of sensitivity I find.
Lip reading by HAL was also a disaster for Frank Poole.
Maybe a large screen that can easily be flipped vertical/horizontal would work well. People already do it with the their smartphones - why not stationary screens? Have the OS detect when it happens so it can make any predetermined layout changes. Maybe have it rotate using a small motor? Cable connections into a base unit to avoid entanglement.
In terms of screens - I think two volume dials to adjust for brightness and another one for blue-light would be ideal. It should be super easy to do at a hardware level. On 24 hour programs if really pedantic. Maybe an external "volume dial" pad that can be plugged into a USB-C would be suffice and it could have a light and movement sensor as well to take a computer out of (and into) suspend and set the desired brightness according to the environment.
There are rechargeable closet lights that already have movement and light sensors - just need to adapt it to a screen.
> Maybe a large screen that can easily be flipped vertical/horizontal would work well. People already do it with the their smartphones - why not stationary screens? Have the OS detect when it happens so it can make any predetermined layout changes. Maybe have it rotate using a small motor? Cable connections into a base unit to avoid entanglement.
Good news: all of this except the motorization is already available from Dell and others. Common office setup. I often see people with one screen in portrait format for reading documents.
Not half, less than that, but I'd have the most commonly used things automatically become the most prominent.
There could also be a feed/notification/realtime panel built into it for programs to insert into. I'd also have a bottle shown there, and I could talk to the genie that lives there. Everytime it wanted to talk, the color would change.
Or just a prompt/chat box.
What would you suggest? Maybe a start window that opens to full screen on the off-chance it's pressed? They're fairly fidgety things, right?
Seeing these brought back a flood of memories. Logging onto AOL through GeoWorks for the first time. Clicking that tiny lit apartment window in the Macintosh mouse tutorial and watching the curtain peel back to reveal a couple dancing inside. Mesmerized by the soft shade on OS/2 buttons like they were works of art (yes, I know that’s weird). Bringing my NeXTstation into the office when I was just a lowly game tester and getting that look from my boss.
NextStep interface still looks sleek and timeless. No doubt a decaying Apple went to acquire them. Having seen some NextStep demos online, it was way ahead of its time. Few weeks ago just started to use WindowMaker again on one of my VMs.
VMS DECwindows Motif 1.0 was released in August 1991; it is difficult for me to comprehend that was 35(!) years ago. I still have a mouse pad from the release party.
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.
He also got Parallax p/NeWS in his collection, which is super rare. I also wrote a person who has a SunDew QIC cassette, and another that has various NeWS sources (including the portable REF tree of the 1.1 version). Unfortunately they haven't released them yet, because of the unknown copyright situation.
Another person has the OpenWindows 1.0 binary tapes for Sun-3 and Sun-4, among other stuff.
For now we have the sources of NeWS 1.1 (and operators.h if you look more in depth) and X/NeWS 2.0. I also have the RBuss sources (an incomplete clone), but I have to ask the author if they can be put on the internet.
> Unfortunately they haven't released them yet, because of the unknown copyright situation.
I’m guessing that’s a euphemism for “almost all software archival work[1] is, technically, illegal enough to ruin the life of everyone who touches it”. This includes stuff like the Space Cadet Pinball for Linux that was on the front page recently and had approving comments from the original programmers. (I believe pre-commercialization Unix is one of the rare exceptions, assuming you ignore the copyrights of everyone who sent their patches to Bell Labs unofficially, as both the authors of those patches and the Bell Labs folks did.)
And it’s fair and probably correct to be afraid here. I just want to point out that this is one of the places where “legal” and “ethical” unequivocally point in opposing directions, and waiting for the legal situation to become more favourable is pretty much equivalent to never doing it. Software has the misfortune of having happened after the advent of pervasive copyright, so there are no out-of-copyright old masters that we could legally base our art on.
Any chance of getting them to donate the code anonymously to one of the willing sacrifices^W^W well-known community figures like Jason Scott?
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
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 through those UIs?
Just some ranting here but it's shockingly better than what I have currently on Mac
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!
Reviewing the screenshots here, I realize profoundly that something about the idealism of the 1990s is baked into them; the 1990s a time before the bad vibes of commercialism mostly destroyed the interwebs.
OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?
The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).
Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.
Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.
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.
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.
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.
The monitors of the time were a lot blurrier than the screen you're looking at the screenshots on. For maximum verisimilitude you'd have to have photographs of screens.
I got an 800x600 LCD monitor in about 1999, and it was a massive upgrade.
It's a tradeoff. A 800x600 CRT will look "blurry" compared to a LCD when rendering old-style GUIs or text in a properly hinted font, but the 800x600 LCD will look blocky and pixelated when rendering a real-world photorealistic image compared to the CRT. The real look of that CRT is more like taking that old 800x600 photo and upscaling it to 1440x1080 on a modern FullHD display. Blurry to be sure, but not blocky or pixelated. Early LCDs also had terrible image persistence/ghosting issues that showed up when playing games.
This collection is a great complement to the everything-x86 PC workstation jungle of the day.
I built a huge tower PC server to run NeXTStep in 1993, but I had no idea how difficult hardware comparability would be. It was a journey. But things improved quickly. So I installed lots of these: OS/2, Windows NT, NextStep, BeOS, Linux, various BSDs.
I found a Computer Shopper from that time. I'm pretty sure I bought one of the tower cases from page 786. Great stuff. Tell them I sent you!
It's funny how early some things do and don't look familiar. A decent chunk of unix-family OSs have changed some since then, but also kinda not. CDE 1.0 looks almost exactly like the latest version:)
God beOS is the absolute peak of pixel-based UI design. It's like what Metal Slug was for pixel art games. Someone needs to add a CRT filter button to the site.
I think the NT4/2000 desktop was pretty perfect. It laid down everything without getting in your way. A lot of early systems were forced to follow simplicity because of lack of resources. This coincidentally led to better interfaces because complexity is difficult to get right and often is in service of business interests instead of technical interests.
I think its obvious that there's a degradation in business products as they age. They become more 'competitive' which means more profit-seeking, so the marketing end of things takes over and the engineering end takes a back seat. Simplicity is replaced with shiny and complexity to catch more edge case sales. Weird cargo cults emerge, product manager cults of personality, etc instead of following proper usability guidelines. Industry fads become self-fulfilling prophecies. Lockdowns and walled gardens emerge because they are more profitable than open systems.
Today, I almost can't believe how hostile and bloaty Windows 11 is and MacOS isn't much better. At least we have FOSS, but the commercial end of things is 'late stage' and frankly awful.
There's a real tragedy how capitalism always leads here. I sometimes wonder if the USSR stuck around what a more technocratic-led system would produce compared to the West.
Over time much NeWS related stuff resurfaced, wheter are application binaries, sources (both application and the server itself) or documentation, so anyone could play with them on a real machine (Sun-3 or SPARC) or inside QEMU SPARC.
I'm waiting for a copy of "Portable NeWS 1.0" to be recovered, to see how much different the sources are compared to the 1.1 version.
I also hope to see resurface binaries/sources of other server implementations, Sun Symbolic Programming Environment (which includes code originally developed at Schlumberger, including LispScript), the sources of the PdB compiler, CMU Andrew wm (although is not directly related, is the ancestor of this window system, from the same authors), and whatever is related to this system.
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 appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.
In some ways X11 with it's focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus, select:middle click paste features provide a far more refined desktop experience then mac or windows ever could. No wait, stop laughing, sure X11 was a garbage fire when it came to consistent professional design, but because it was such a wild west of an environment there was place for real ui innovation. I know, I get grumpy fast without middle click paste. And I hate having to raise a window in order to click and type on it(A common access pattern for me is to read docs on the top window while I am operating the bottom window).
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.
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.
It's nice to see some of these things and finally make out any contents! I've felt hurt by Wikipedia's somewhat odd and sad screenshot policy, which makes it impossible to see any details of the things I've been looking at recently, like early Windows NT.
There is a `man` entry displayed in a terminal window there. The first Unix I've ever touched was HP-UX on an HP-9000 (server series, not the workstation one), and I have this memory that the underlined words you can see in that manpage as well were actually hyperlinks you can select and would bring you to the relevant section of the manpage that discussed that term. Am I fabricating that memory or is it real? I cannot find any info about it on the Internet.
I started with HP-UX 9.03 on a PA-RISC-powered 715-75 (to
use Emacs, our whole research group logged into the 735 server to edit there, which was faster than running it locally).
Any unclean pointer fiddling in C, and the process was terminated by the OS, so the machine was wonderful to use as a development box (especially with Purify installed) for software that would later be run on Windows or Linux.
I eventually bought my own refurbished (and using academic discount) 715 (instead of a car), so I had the fastest machine in our student dorm of anyone I knew, undergrad, grad student or professor. I could just write my Master's thesis when everyone else kept re-installing Windows - the HP never crashed in 6.5 years, which has left me with deep respect for the old-schol (pre-Compaq) HP engineers. The machine (21" color CRT) occupied half of my 9 square metre dorm room, but it also kept me warm.
In the GNU world, indeed. And that's why it makes even harder for me to remember exactly, it was 30 years ago, I was clueless and also Linux was already "big enough" to have some Red Hat installed in some x86 PC in the same lab.
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.
I remember using some kind of software around the time of windows xp i think, that could replace the chrome/shell so you could design your own GUI entirely – but I can't remember what it was called! I spent a lot of time iterating and experimenting back then, replacing iexplore.exe or whatever the main process was called.
The aspect ratios were much "taller" back then, which was kind of better for editing code. All these late 90s designs were near NTSC at the time - aspect ratios like 1.25:1 (1280x1024) or 1024x768 (1.33:1). Monitors have always followed TVs, since displays now are the "HD" ratio of 16:9 (1.77:1), or 16:10 if we're lucky. But we do get way more pixels now anyway.
Use portrait displays! You'll never complain about the height again. Use 1440p (or scaled equivalent) and the width won't be an issue either. Many displays make this easy (all the Dells I've had can rotate), and adequate rotating stands aren't necessarily expensive.
No https version of this site, I configured my browser to warn or block non https websites, since from my experience few of those tried to force download (what i can only assume to be viruses) to my computer
I understand that https can do that to, but its usually the none https that does, so its a decent configuration to have
It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other!
System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.
While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.
Regarding Amiga screenshots, they've taken care to get the DigiPaint aspect ratios right, but the Workbench 2.04 screenshot is in a resolution that comes from an add-in graphics card rather than the Amiga's custom chips. It's a resolution Workbench wasn't graphically designed for, so it looked wrong in such a resolution at the time. If you double the screenshot's height, then everything (text, icons, window gadgets etc) looks right.
It would be more representative of the OS, and the era, to have a height-doubled "HiRes" screenshot, 640x200 or 640x256.
The aspect ratio is correct on all screenshots and are accurate de-interlaced representations of a 640x400/512 workbench setup, even though these particular screenshots are in RTG dimensions. Starting with ECS, the Amiga was also capable of true non-interlaced 640x400 output (and even 480 vertical lines unless I misremember) in what was commonly called "productivity mode", limited to 4 colors (2 bitplanes).
Interlaced workbench setups weren't uncommon. I ran such on and off for years for certain productivity stuff where I wanted more screen real estate, until I decided to spend money on a flicker-fixer.
Yes it is, was my post unclear? Following your suggestion that someone might contribute a screenshot of 1.x, which I agree would be a nice addition, I'm suggesting a "HiRes" screenshot of 2.x or 3.x would be a better representation of how it looked in-period to the vast majority of users. The point is just that the icons, text, and general UI chrome were designed for that lower vertical resolution.
I ran the interlaced modes later after buying a flicker-fixer, but didn't know of anyone who used them without one - the flicker meant those interlaced modes weren't generally considered to be very usable.
I was still in school when OS/2 came out. I read about it in the magazines never touching it myself. I was impressed with its aesthetics but never knew with the clout of IBM why it never took off. My guess is internal politics killed OS/2 more than Microsoft?
Internal politics, yeah, maybe; because IBM certainly didn’t do much to market it. That, and bundling deals Microsoft had with OEM hardware vendors (if you want the discount, then Windows has to go on every machine). OS/2 advertised a “better Windows than Windows”. Problem was, software vendors then said, “great, now we don’t have to do an OS/2 port!”
The BeOS aesthetic has aged so well. I'll always wonder what might've been had they not been deliberately smothered in the crib (or at the very least if Apple had chosen to acquire them).
I miss my GEM desktop and products. They were so ahead of their time. And Ventura publisher! I made some school projects using that. Brings back some good memories.
... 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]
> ... 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?
I hated magenta-blue CGA graphics soooo sooo much as a kid. It was (and still is IMHO) the ugliest thing I ever saw on a computer, by far.
I had a monitor that had a switch in the back that would change those colors to red-yellow-green. It was still awful but at least it was less awful than white-magenta-blue
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.
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’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use.
That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.
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, the entire thing. This was not normal in the day. Or that NS used Display PostScript. "Not only are they moving the entire window, they're using DPS to do it!" PostScript was powerful, and expensive, and for printers. Yet, here it was.
Or how fast BeOS was, and its cool filesystem, and other aspects.
It's certainly an interesting question to ask folks that have opinions simply on the cosmetics of the various images that we see here, but appreciate that for the folks that "were there", at least for me, I'm not just remembering what it looked like, it's much more than that.
I will never forget when the Mac first came out, my friend and I went to see one at a computer store. And my friend just sat there, mouth agape, moving the mouse back and forth across the menubar, seeing them popup and popdown as it moved, and just going "Woooowwww".
> 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.
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
I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds).
Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.
I don't know about. All the different apps and OS windows are so inconsistent with each other. There is not much sense of an overall aesthetic. Just a mishmash of vaguely similar styles.
Basing one's opinion on how a static screenshot looks, is the reason we've moved towards pretty looks and away from usability concerns.
As other commentors have said, the overriding concern with these older OSs was to make them as easy as possible to use. It would never have crossed these developers' minds to, for example, hide the scrollbar because they think it looks ugly.
Looking at a screenshot doesn't really tell you anything if you're not familiar with it, but it's a nice reminder of using that software for those who are.
In most of the comments here, I'm not seeing "nostalgia" or "the love for youth". I'm seeing frustration with how the carefully researched and developed principles have been forgotten.
For some of these, you have to use them on the actual hardware to understand why so many of us are bummed about what we have lost. The latency of modern systems is kind of bonkers. Even though the machines were incredibly slow they feel faster than modern machines. Some musicians used Atari STs for years after they were discontinued because of the stable timing.
For others, the hardware wasn't important, but some of the functionality isn't apparent in a static screenshot. For example, I loved OS/2 and the Workplace Shell. It had functionality similar to Windows COM or CORBA in that everything on the system exposed an interface that could be easily scripted or used by other applications. The built-in scripting language was Rexx which I feel could have played the role Python does now if only OS/2 had taken off. Using OS/2 from 1.3 onwards felt like you were using a computer from the future.
I'm under 30 at least and I do feel nostalgia for these albeit not having used most of them. First OS I ever used must have been Windows 95. I wish we could all go back to Windows 7, that was the best OS ever imo.
Hi! I'm slightly under that so I feel like I'm qualified :)
I wholeheartedly agree, they're quite a regression.... although I don't think this is a popular opinion around here.
When people say "something used to be better" they usually don't mean literally, they mean that for the circumstances, it was better. Of course, more modern systems support more hardware, more features, etc., but if you made those same modern technical improvements on top of an older designs, you'd get much better results.
To me it looks like software design has been massively overtaken by "form over function", everyone just wants a unique "brand" but the actual UX is complete dogshit. Borderless buttons, zero indication what's clickable, no visual delimiters for different areas of programs, no good shortcut / altkey menu support, etc....
This has somehow infected even Linux to such a crazy extent...
I'm 23 and IMO, the Windows desktop style peaked somewhere in Windows 95-2000. The first Windows I ever used was XP, so I'm mostly making that decision based off screenshots and emulators.
UIs back then were dense, didn't waste large amounts of space in a misguided attempt to be "minimalist", and had affordances for ease of use. There was no scrollbar hiding, no animations that made the user wait for no reason other than the designer's ego, very visible borders on windows and buttons that made finding/resizing them easier, large bars at the top of windows that let you move them around, and actual text for most buttons instead of icons that are anyone's guess what they mean. Thankfully some of this can be dialed back in the Windows 11 accessibility settings, at least for missing scrollbars and getting rid of time wasting animations, but a lot of programs don't respect those.
That's right there is a good indicator for which programs care about their users. I'm using your program because I want to actually do something, not waste time watching your designers show off.
I've disabled animations on my Android phone too, and it gives an extremely noticable speedup. Menus appear right when I click them, instead of a second later as they slide into existence. Too bad iPhones just replace the slide with a fade of equal duration; disrespect for the user's time like that is yet another reason I will never buy one.
Those older GUIs didn't try to hide the filesystem hierarchy either. It infuriates me to no end when I use a new OS and have to hunt down the way to show the disk root, or filename extensions, or hidden files. MacOS was especially bad; I had to look up a freaking keyboard shortcut that I never would have found on my own. The common reason is so "normal people" can use the interfaces, but I think that's infantilizing and is why tons of Gen Z don't know what files or folders are. Most people can learn .docx means a Word document, and C:\Users\TheirName is where their files are.
(Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it. People will just go right back to Windows 11 because it's somehow better.)
There's some improvements possible, for sure. I'd like to see some programs put hint letters over buttons when you press a modifier like Ctrl so you can easily see what the shortcuts are. I don't know of any that do, but it'd be very useful for more complex software like drawing programs or word processors.
> Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it.
I'll never understand who in their right mind would think that in a save dialog, if I start typing, I mean to search for something instead of trying to change the name of the file. It's really baffling.
That Wikipedia article needs a better screenshot. Otherwise, very interesting. And DESQview/X was X Window System on DOS with pre-emptive multitasking, wow.
GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. I first saw this on a friends' parents computer and was quite astonished why computers may look like that. I was very used to Windows/DOS back then.
I am also glad to have switched to Linux in 2004 already. Once you have been using Linux for a while, whenever I use windows I am annoyed at how slow it is. Just file copy operations alone and then billion excuses windows developers make, trying to copsplain why it is so slow. When I have to backup 30GB, I don't want an explanation why it is slow - I simply use what is faster. And that's just one advantage of many more Linux has. (I use the commandline most of the time though, so KDE and GNOME are IMO just pointless eyecandy these days.)
xfm from the first Slackware print, I really liked that file manager. But these days it fails to work. I tied many years ago to get it work but failed :(
You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
Yep even the later ones. I used to sit in front of a Solaris CDE desktop locked in a basement. Made me want to slit my wrists. The colour scheme, how it worked, the peformance. All horrible.
I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.
Ooo, a rare fellow home RISC OS user! I had an A3000 at home myself so I didn't have the benefit of using RISC OS with a hard drive, and we never upgraded to an ARM3, but we did use both RISC OS 2 and 3.
Still love the old Acorn machines. I mostly use Arculator[0] nowadays for that nostalgia though.
[0] https://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/
Brilliant. Yeah there were a few of us back in the day! Had an A440 then a RiscPC 700 here. Hard disk made all the difference even if it was only a 40MB one!
There's a nice emulator here, a WebAssembly RiscPC one. Works quite well: https://rpcemu.m-h.org.uk/
I have a local version of RPCemu too, but I never had a Risc PC myself so it's not as interesting to me; we got a PC about half a year after Windows 95 released.
Have you come across the Stardot[0] community yet? I feel like you'd enjoy it. Fair warning: it's more focused on the Acorn computers themselves (both 8-bit and 26/32-bit) than the continuing development of RISC OS. That said, I personally think it's great.
[0] https://www.stardot.org.uk/
> I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.
Same here.
Windows 2 and Mac System 6 at work, RISC OS 2 at home -- faster, more responsive, more capable and flexible, and much better looking.
Some of my friends had Amigas and to me, oh wow was AmigaOS 1.x fugly.
40 years later, KDE still is.
GNOME is beautiful but it's so limited it feels like trying to operate a mouse and keyboard with my feet while sitting on my hands.
COSMIC feels fast and powerful, but it is not easy on the eyes, and the keyboard UI is poor.
Actually no, CDE, NeWS and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIX GUIs.
On FOSS side, I would vote for afterstep, windowmaker, original GNOME with sawmill, and KDE.
They're getting better with time relative to modern GUIs.
I wasn't a big fan of Windows 3.1 or Motif in their heyday, but compared to the visual chaos we have nowadays they're looking pretty good.
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.
Relevant:
"Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes"
(May 4, 2026)
https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxe...
Yeah some of them just ran bad even on fully speced systems. The vision of the software was far beyond the hardware for a long while.
The network is the computer.
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:
Under Mac you might have a similar Cocoa setting or whatever is called (nsproperties?) with "defaults write".On Mac, the setting is also simply exposed in the normal “System Settings” app. “Appearance” → “Show scroll bars” → “Always”.
I'm on Windows and Mac. Not because I love them, but because that is where my customers are. Also I try to keep my computers fairly vanilla, so that they don't look too different to the user's computer when I do videos or screenshots of my software.
Windows: Settings -> Accessibility -> Always show scrollbars.
Which is ignored by most programs.
Report as bug. A surprising number of (commercial or open source) projects care about accessibility settings
Of course, a smaller but no less surprising number of projects don't. The complexity of such a report is so low, though, that one might as well try for software that you actually use
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 here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. 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. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.
> 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 low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast.
The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.
Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
> 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.
Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor?
I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".
Amiga OS 2.0 was a huge improvement in that regard! It had more of a 3D look.
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
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 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.
> 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...
One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on.
http://xaaes.gokmase.com/
You can even run MagiC on Linux now:
https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/magiclinux
> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations.
Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original.
Which is what led to FreeMINT and TOS 4, and the desire for a FOSS distro of that is what led to AFROS.
> You can even run MagiC on Linux now
Oh! I knew he'd open-sourced it. I did mention MagiC in passing in my follow-up to Nemanja's history:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html
I didn't realise there had been recent activity. I must try it. Thank you!
Being in the North American sphere and distinctly post-Atari by the mid 90s, I didn't really know about MagiC until much later. It's pretty amazing what he built!
Too bad it's 100% assembler. Though very nicely written assembler.
Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched. I am tempted to point an LLM at the MagiC sources and have it port to Coldfire :-)
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). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.)
On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.
Yup.
Nemanja Trifunovic's recent history is pretty good, I thought.
https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...
> 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.
IRIX used the 4Dwm window manager, which is a lot more polished than other UNIX desktops. Few screens I found: https://deskto.ps/u/fathonix/d/3p6fkk https://files.catbox.moe/cognfj.jpg https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/irix/screenshots
> https://files.catbox.moe/cognfj.jpg
That screenshot shows songs from the band "Bran Van 3000" playing and "Drinking in L.A." is in the list, now that is trip down memory lane! (late 90s)
Thank you so much for that, haven't listened to that in a very long time.
Notably, NeXT scrollbars were also on the left edge of the window, the logic being that (at least for left-to-right languages) most people focus on the left side of the document more often. I remember liking it.
I wonder why Apple swapped back to the right-hand scrollbars with OS X. I guess just because that's what classic MacOS and nearly everyone else did.
My thoughts:
1. There were far more users of the classic Mac OS than there were users of NeXTstep/OPENSTEP. Mac OS X has many of OPENSTEP’s underpinnings, but it wasn’t OPENSTEP 5.0; it was Mac OS X, a continuation of the Mac but with new underpinnings. The interface was different enough to represent a new direction for the Mac but without turning the Mac UI/UX into that of NeXT.
2. At the time NeXTstep was under development (mid-late 1980s), the case law surrounding UI look-and-feel and how much borrowing and inspiration one could have before it became infringing wasn’t settled. Apple had lawsuits with Digital Research and Microsoft over whether GEM and Windows infringed on the Macintosh’s look-and-feel. Recall that NeXT was formed after Steve Jobs’ failed coup at Apple against then-CEO John Sculley. Apple sued NeXT due to Jobs’ poaching of key Apple employees who worked with him on the Macintosh and allegations that NeXT was going to use Apple’s intellectual property (in some ways NeXT could be thought of as the evolution of the “Big Mac” project Steve Jobs worked on before his departure). They ended up settling out of court, but given Apple’s litigious nature and given the history of how NeXT came to be, it was very wise for NeXTstep to feature a UI/UX that was a radical departure from the Macintosh. While I don’t think a lawsuit about right-hand scroll bars would succeed, having them on the left helps defend against allegations that NeXTstep ripped off the Mac.
I wonder if it's righthanded mouse users? I'm using a vertical ergo mouse beneath my monitor, and your comment made me realize that it's quite similar to if I just.. reached for the scrollbar and pulled it. As opposed to having to cross the whole screen, metaphorically.
There's also the distraction factor. Maybe having the bar moving on the left edge competes with moving from line to line, and the general anchoring edge of the F shaped reading pattern.
Total speculation on my part.
There's a Slackware screenshot from 1994:
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/linux-0.99p15-fvwm-m...
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.
There is an SGI IRIX screenshot there from late 90’s. I scanned the list to take a look specifically for it.
I once saw 4 of the SGI Onyx2 RealityMonster supercomputers in a post-production house’s render farm in London.
They were so expensive, ($1m+ per computer) that it was only financially viable if they were engaged on client work 24/7/365. Damn gorgeous things and they turned the display of those into almost an art piece for wow-ing film studio execs.
Fun times.
I may have some KDE 2 and 3 screenshots to add.
Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.
No mention of GeOS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks
Or GS/OS for the Apple IIgs, the weird "not exactly Mac OS" GUI.
That was my first GUI, on the Commodore 64 with RAM expansion (don't remember if I had the 128kb or 256kb expansion). I wrote and laid out my user group newsletter on GeoPublish. I felt like I was running a Mac.
I only know it existed because on Portugal, Phillips had an option to ship GeoWorks instead of Windows on their PCs, and a guy on our class was very adamant defending it.
There is the 16-bit Geoworks Ensemble (PC/GEOS), at least.
Which is FOSS now!
https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
My favorites:
GEM + Ventura Publisher http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1....
Viewpoint http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...
AUX http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png
It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+. It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered.
Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.
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 seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab
Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
> 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 Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn.
It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
> safe triangles in nested menus
I did not know about this, but I did notice my own menu-rage every time a submenu disappears!
I was trying to use Orca Slicer (which itself is intractable) and it had a combo button whose menu was disconnected from the button. The menu would disappear as soon as the cursor left the button boundary, but because it was disconnected, there was no way to get to the menu without leaving the button boundary, traveling a void, and then getting to the menu. I’m unsure what incantation allowed me to finally choose the right command, but forget how it looks, it was if no one even tried to see if it works.
Most fun is when the menu opens both on button hover and on button press, but if the menu already opened, clicking the button closes it instead, so the first 2-3 you use it, you end up opening the panel and closing it immediately.
Not sure how stuff like this gets deployed in the first place, guess we're just a few people left who test things we develop before we push them to the public, I'd rather believe that than that people just don't care anymore...
I feel like the modern web/app ecosystems have forced developers onto a red queen type treadmill, so software never really matures. They often build up to 70% of the features they want, the codebase gets intractable because of all the crap they have to deal with and they start over.
I love software like Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, etc, that matured over decades and kept their soul.
Potentially keyboard arrows?
There are still UX research. It's just that the collective "we" has changed and we can/may build on some existing design decisions.
You are always designing something with a target audience in mind, and the next, e.g. mobile phone will very likely be used by someone who has interacted briefly with a similar device, so you may re-use some already learnt patterns.
The very early UXs built heavily on desktop metaphors (like folders), but at this point many (and an increasing number of) people are more familiar with OS UI n-1 than a typical office setting.
So I don't think jumping to this conclusion is correct - there are well-designed software, it has just become much much cheaper to create new ones, so the average quality has necessarily went down.
> 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 "..."
Yes, two.
Incidentally I was looking for how to delete a file, which is now deliberately missing from the object's context menu, and intentionally hidden under one of these.
A few weeks ago I was co-hosting a live coding session (in front of a crowd, it was pretty collaborative, back-and-forth).
I had to authorize something with Firebase, for which I had to auth with Google, for which I had to do a MFA with my (Pixel) phone.
Usually it's "are you trying to auth" and finger-to-the-scanner, but around that time this particular way didn't work. It also didn't want to send me a text or a call to auth me.
No, I had to find an OTP code. Easy, right? Wrong. The instructions, and the docs, don't match where it was in that particular version of Android, and there were a bunch of blind alleys that were named basically the same.
It took me like 10 minutes, on stage, browsing my phone (thankfully, not casted to screen) to find the friggin' option. Thankfully the cohost was doing the presenting at that time, but it was pretty lousy.
And this is using Google's OS on a Google phone doing a Google auth flow for a Google property. And I'm a techie who's been using Android for 15+ years now. And I did the exact same dance a few weeks before that - also so roundabout I had no idea how I stumbled on the correct page.
User experience my ass.
PS. The regular "are you trying to sign in?" flow works again. No idea what happened - wasn't me.
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 ..."
But if we didn’t use ••• menus everywhere then some parts of the UI might be cLuTtErEd!!! The worst sin of computing.
To think that we used to trust mere mortals - without even a signing certificate or developer membership - with the power to customize every toolbar in a Microsoft application, and to set every font and color for the whole UI of the system. People made their computer environments ugly in some cases. And it was fine, because they owned those freaking computers, so who the heck has any business telling them not to?
Sorry, clearly it bugs me a lot how much we’ve lost.
It's not just what we've lost, it's an incredible disservice to "non-nerds" - old DOS programs may have been annoying and cluttered, but everything was right there and more importantly, it didn't change so you could learn what you needed and just work with it.
We could go back and forth on things like "the ribbon" being better or worse, but the fact that it changes depending on window size is an incredible sin. Hello, everyone! Learn how to click a tiny 5x5 pixel arrow or lose your menu items forever!
It's like a compromise was made at some point where they decided that in order to get what they predicted would be slightly higher adoption, it's okay to usher in a world where most consumer-facing software is essentially impossible to become a 'power user' of, because of abridged ('decluttered') functionality, lack of keyboard shortcuts, extreme lag caused by excessive animation, and a UI that changes for fashion reasons every few months.
I look at retail for examples of this. If you watch an experienced cashier who interacts with a system all day, they have perfect muscle memory of the keyboard or keypad, and operate it so fast that you would have to ask them to slow down to understand what they're doing.
Now many of those have been replaced with touchscreens, which are noticeably worse -- since the UI is never fast, you have to stop and wait for the next UI to appear after many of the steps, instead of letting the keyboard buffer do it for you, which worked great on a decades-old system. But, I assume the companies who allowed that replacement believed it was worth it to be able to onboard a new cashier just a bit quicker, with a UI that looks just like the iPads that they were raised on, complete with big unlabeled icons and "three lines" or "•••" buttons.
I’m always reminded of the old text UIs at Fry’s Electronics - a salesman could slam in all the keystrokes necessary to print your pick slip before the screen had even finished loading the first inventory. It was pretty impressive.
Meanwhile I live in a world where opening five Salesforce tabs locks them all up.
The UI wouldn't be cluttered if the keys on the...keyboard...did stuff. Now that vibe-coding has broken me out of my decades-long irrational fear of GUI programming, I've recently been circling back on all the UI patterns I have just accepted. One missing one is all those F1...F12 keys. I remember those doing stuff in the DOS days. I fantasize about a computer where the menus are at the bottom of the screen and line up with the Fn keys on the keyboard. I know...it might be possible for even grandma to figure that one out.
Arguably the trend to touchscreens could have given a lot of help to the novice user by having labeled buttons - onscreen FKeys if you will. But we seem to have used touchscreens to show pictures fullscreen, with controls that disappear until you swipe or touch something just the right way.
Fkeys are arguably a huge tragedy, here we have keys, twelve of them, that could have been used for simple one-fingered operation, but they were put to use pretty sparingly for a long time (basically F2 and Alt-F4 were the only common ones most people used, with F1 for Help and F11 often used for Full Screen as honorable mention) so the laptop manufacturers reused them, leading to a world where they go from being the easiest and best keyboard shortcut keys, to one of the worst, since you probably need to teach people how to find and use a 'Fn' key to use them.
Touchscreen UIs definitely could be made a lot better. For example, long-press has always annoyed me. Why isn't there a modifier button that allows selecting the interaction mode before touching (e.g. a mode button separate from the thing being clicked on, that can also be clicked on with one finger)? Similarly, wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to know, before clicking, what a button might do, and whether that could be undone? Steep, steep asks, I know.
I’d love to use those keyboards that can light keys to flash the key combo for the menu items.
It seems now it’s not worth learning the keystrokes because everything is a website or changes randomly. Ah, for the days when Excel supported Lotus 1-2-3 shortcut mode for decades.
> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this.
Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.
If you haven't tried it already, I've found it useful to get Windows to use the accent colour in the title bar and window borders: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/personalize-your...
Absolutely, but there are many programs that don't use that accent color, making it less useful than it should be.
Thank you for posting this. I have enabled them at home and work. I am really tired of having to look for a window's shadow to resize it. Which is problematic when you run a black desktop.
Having to resize a window by grabbing it just outside the visible border is so wrong.
"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"."
With desktop OS I feel a lot of designers don't know how to use them. They grew up with phones and never use a desktop OS outside of work.
Chesterton's fence! Don't delete something unless you know why it's there in the first place.
> based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
It's worthwhile to note that this was not just research in a vacuum, but a lot of user studies where they literally watched and studied people using the software and how they were confused, found or didn't find functionality, etc. Lots of interviews, talking to people, boiling things down to how actual people struggled with the software.
One example of a UI being a result of research seems to be Windows 98. Much of the surface is gray, and a lot of the text is black. It might look boring, but that is how you get to use a little colour for things that need accent, and it will make a difference. Also in a factory, the walls are gray, but the fire extinguisher is red so that you can hardly miss it.
> opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them
The latest design of interfaces is designed by people who have barely used a desktop computer and have no idea of the conventions or advanced usage. They create terrible UIs because they have no idea what a good UI is and they often don't even use the product they create.
> 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.
You are so very spot on with this. All of it. Literally nothing is better in the UI world in the past 20 years. Zero. We already had multitouch scrolling on laptops back then.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the problem can be traced back to the transition to Mobile first design. The motivations were arguably pretty innocent in general. If there were no downsides, it’s nice that there isn’t a separate code base and an entirely separate set of capabilities for desktop and little 5-inch phone screens. However, the way that we have achieved that - nearly across the board - is by lobotomizing the experience everywhere.
And because of fashion (those artists who control the UX can’t resist it), even in places where that doesn’t even make any sense because there is no mobile version (say, B2B SaaS products that only get used on a desktop), they still feel the need to cosplay as a mobile app by using all the same stupid design elements (the ••• and “hamburger” menus, the giant grids of “tiles” that should have been a table, etc.
> And because of fashion...
That's basically the curse. Fucking fashion. If that human concept wouldn't exist, UIs today would be way way better. But no, we have to keep changing it forever and with each iteration worse and worse. UI enshittification at its pinnacle.
> 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.
I didn't know that. I actually used Windows until 2019 and only learned about this feature last week. Well, that does it: UI has only gotten worse.
you can also hold down the windows key and use the arrow keys to position the window left/right top left/top right/bottom left/bottom right.
And Windows-shift-up to make a window fill the vertical space of the screen without changing its width.
Released November 8 2006, so not yet 20Y old... quite...
idk, i think your underestimating the ubiquity and resources behind stuff like A/B and usability testing nowadays. Certainly a much more sophisticated way of determining whether people are able to find what they need.
What good does A/B testing do if both options are shit?
> 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.
‘Took out usability features to make them "look nicer"’ is exactly how Steve Jobs gave us the double-click, undiscoverable and timing-sensitive.
Double-click came out of Xerox's research park. Apply might have been the first to put that into a popular desktop PC solution, but it wasn't their design any more than the rest of the system they copied. There are arguments that a second button was a much better idea, but that would still not be immediately discoverable and even with many buttons in modern solutions we _still_ have double-clicking.
Minor correction - Xerox knew they could not commercialise their invention so they wanted someone to take it off their hands. So Apple didn't copy - they paid for it (in stock, not cash) - and if you've ever used a Smalltalk environment you'll know that what Apple actually shipped (in the Lisa and then the Mac) is a _lot_ of work done over the top of what Xerox had.
Everything I have read about this suggests it was Apple. e.g. https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
It may have been Tajo (XDE) though a quick search doesn't find any documentation of multi-click _older_ than Apple's.
Star definitely didn't have multi-click.
I've always heard it came from Xerox PARC, but even if it originated at Apple, it would have been one of their OS devs. It's nuts how the cult of Steve Jobs leads some to label him as the inventor of everything.
And something my older relatives have trouble with to this day, no matter how much I adjust their double-click timing settings...
I have most things set .to single click to activate.
My pet peeve is spacing. My usual resolution is 1920x1080 (scaled or not) and it feels I could cram more information in an old 1024x768 desktop. You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
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 clarity improved significantly. But I also sacrificed usable space because apps don't adjust, everything is just made larger.
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.
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>> You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
At work I use 1 or 2 monitors plus the laptop screen (on Windows). At home I just use a single 55" 4K TV for my monitor and place apps center, left, right, and up top for rarely used stuff (on Linux). The desktop metaphor always wanted a big display but you're right - most Windows apps expect a full 1920x1080 for themselves.
Same here. The Teams meeting page layout pisses me off on a regular basis, with way too much useless space around everything, tons of unhideable icons and crap filling half the screen, and all the actual content crammed into a little box. I'm sitting here with a 4K 27" monitor and all that space and resolution is just wasted. Yeah you can work around it, but what a PITA.
For the brief time I used Windows 11 the amount of times I placed a window over another and then clicked on the wrong window because I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended was absolutely ridiculous.
I'm afraid that the core of the problem is something far more simple and fundamental.
The people designing desktop apps today simply never learned the conventions that make desktop applications good. They grew up with smartphone apps, web apps, electron apps, games, etc.
In fact, you can observe from things like JavaFX, Flutter, WPF, etc., that the trend has long been about the ability of easily creating custom widgets like you could with Javascript (or Flash), rather than the convenience of having a library of widgets that look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system.
"I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended "
Sometimes I am starting to feel like how my dad looked many years ago when I tried to teach him how to use Windows. He simply couldn't see the window borders. With the latest designs I am reaching this point too. I am struggling moving and resizing windows because I can't tell where the border is.
> couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended
This was even worse in an RDP session. No drop shadows. I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea.
> I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea.
It's just the old Windows 2.0 look.
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...
I must have missed that being added. I'll have to play next time I'm in front of one of my windows machines.
Even back when we had much fewer pixels on most displays, people knew 1px drag targets were a bad idea. Some UIs dos have single pixel borders, but tended to have extra decorations at the corners so there was something larger to interact with there, and/or implemented something like a control key making any point in the window a size/move target.
> look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system
Which is what? Windows natively has like 4 official looks. You can click around the 2 (!) settings programs and pop open windows for basically every framework windows has created (and deprecated) in the last 2 decades.
We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc.
But we did gain some nice things!
- Tabs.
- Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.
- Document editors remembering unsaved changes.
- Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
- Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings (we need more of those).
- Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc).
- Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`).
- Map widgets, a small miracle we take for granted.
- Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.
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 that's a problem for you, you have much to gain with better window management shortcuts. On KDE I have the Windows key + left click set to drag a window from anywhere, and win + right click to resize depending on the quadrant the cursor is on. It's incredibly satisfying not having to hunt titlebar empty spaces or thin edges.
My main interaction tool with the system is the pointer. Reaching out for the keyboard is something I do when I want to type, but for example when I am consuming content on my computer I just keep a single hand on the mouse or the trackpad. In that case shortcuts are just plain annoying.
On KDE, something nice is that if you have a maximized window and a panel on the top of the screen, I can drag that panel to grab the window (or maybe it was a setting of Latte dock or something). And since window titlebars nowadays can be cluttered with buttons, it is a predictable way to grab those windows only using the mouse.
But do you see that title bar buttons are bad explicitly because you have to hunt for title bar edges?
That you were more or less forced to adopt these KDE shortcuts so that you could work around the fact that they had cannibalized the title bar for a purpose it was not designed for.
You were forced to change your workflow and everybody else is having to be forced to adapt because they changed a metaphor that has remained stable on the desktop for over 40 years
The arguments in this thread-- amounting to "it's a good general practice because I happen to like it" (rather than "it is a sane / discoverable / usable default") are precisely demonstrating why these issues exist.
UX design is treated as a subjective matter, as if it is equally valid to clearly label UI elements as it is to have magic, nondescript UI pixels that serve as vital control surfaces.
Go watch videos of the research Xerox did on UI/UX and HCI in general, and weep for what we have lost...
I already weep deeply for what we have lost, and what we cannot imagine, and what we can imagine and build but nobody would use because they are too ignorant to learn and adapt.
My argument for the titlebar is that it was at least researched UI/UX convention done by Apple/IBM/Microsoft at the nascence of personal computing. These are the primitives that arose from that research.
It is not out of what I happen to like that I argue this. I personally am deeply frustrated by cursor-y window controls. I much prefer a tiled interface with a top menu bar and copious keyboard shortcut compositions. I, if I could, would Never use the mouse, and if I needed axial control for a 3d environment would prefer to use an analog stick of some sort. Unfortunately those are not the conventions we have for general computing, especially in the workplace.
We are in general forced to use the conventions given to us by the major OS providers. One of those used to be the titlebar, with which you could use the cursor to control the window. The insistence of the current tech industry to shove any button they like up there without regard for these conventions that have been set for decades (and were in many cases of this sin set by their company: M∫/M$ --the integral symbol is a slop 'S') is causing real economic harm in terms of lost productivity from broken muscle memory and wasted actions
I wasn't forced to adopt tho, these shortcuts go back to when Windows had chunky borders in XP/7. It was just something that a lot of Linux WMs did and it's incredibly useful so I found ways to do the equivalent on all operating systems.
Also KDE seems pretty staunchly _against_ client-side decorations with buttons other than the window manager buttons.
> You were forced to change your workflow and everybody else is having to be forced to adapt because they changed a metaphor that has remained stable on the desktop for over 40 years
All of the "positive" items I listed come with drawbacks. I didn't realize I might be in the minority for this one, since I genuinely prefer the new workflow.
The old ways supported both keyboard and mouse workflows, on purpose. There was no reason to collapse the titlebar except for the unfortunate time when 16:9 monitors were forced on us and vertical space became precious. A time thankfully that is over.
Today I have one 3:2 and one portrait monitor so compacted titlebars are particularly poor design.
Thankfully KDE for the most part does not indulge in that, and let’s you fix window borders, but they have other failures such as hard coded button order in dialogs.
The reason they have to put all that crap in the title bar is because of all the other bad UI decisions that used up all the screen space.
There's a lot of mouse centric workflows, where you don't want to keep switching between mouse and keyboard all the time.
fwiw, when I'm on an OpenBSD desktop, I use cwm which doesn't supply titlebars, and I use Meta+click to move windows. That's great...On OpenBSD. But sometimes I'm using a Windows computer. Sometimes I'm using a Mac.
...And sometimes I'm using OpenBSD, so titlebar buttons introduce a titlebar I didn't want, and didn't need, which doesn't match the rest of my desktop customizations.
It's just a bad paradigm.
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.
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.
> 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 space could possibly need saving?
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
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> 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
> - Tabs.
Tabs aren't really new: look at BeOS which could "tab" windows..
That said I agree with you that tab are really nice, especially the way VSCode manage them with the vertical list of opened files (I switched from vim to VSCode due to this feature).
> loading bars (replaced with throbbers)
There is a very practical reason for this; most GUI apps are webapps (whether local or not is irrelevant), and the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
There might have been worse ways to design the fetch API, but off-hand, I can't think of any - what came before it was immensely better for a user experience.
With a better API we could have a progress bar that goes through the TCP/IP stack: advance when the domain is resolved, when a handshake is finished, when the request is sent, when the response starts streaming back, when the response finishes.
It'd be a very jumpy bar, but it helps develop intuitions. "The first part is always slower on this machine", "when it gets stuck on this spot I need to reset my router", "this part will be slow because the request is large", etc.
Perhaps an aside, but the things we do to compensate for the warts of TCP are staggering.
This isn't a TCP problem, though. It's a fetch API problem.
Even if fetch ran over UDP, or a direct serial connection, or IP over Avian carrier, it'd still be a poor API that doesn't allow progress indication.
Most of the time you're fetching multiple things in parallel and you could show a progress of how many of those are done (perhaps weighted by estimated size). That's essentially the way many progress bars work.
> As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
We used to have the cursor indicating this in the good old days.
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
This is a failure of whatever framework the web dev is leaning on instead of actually programming the computer.
It is perfectly possible to get real progress information other than yes/no. Web sites had it for years before lazy spinners took over.
>> the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).
>> As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
> This is a failure of whatever framework the web dev is leaning on instead of actually programming the computer.
No, it's a failure of fetch.
I appreciate this balanced take! Let's hope one day we'll get the best of today's and yesterday's era.
There was a brief moment in history where we had the best of both worlds.
I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha).
We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
...and of course, Portable Apps require a relatively stable ABI...
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
>Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux
Though macOS I think has a similar issue.
> - Tabs.
Should have been a generic window manager feature.
Apparently Cosmic will even let you combine different apps in the same tab group. I read that but haven't confirmed.
Web browsers had to innovate because OSes, DEs and GUI toolkits stagnated. Tabs and better sandboxing came from web the browser.
BeOS sort-of did that.
fluxbox have been doing that for over 20 years
I don't miss the loading bar. The progress in the bar never seems to correlate well with the actual time taken. It's not uncommon to have a progress bar breeze through the first half in seconds and spend minutes on the later half or vice versa. It's misleading to the point I recall "progress bar stuck on 99%" became a meme before people started calling them memes.
Just give me the option to view a log of what is happening under the hood. Tell me which step of the process you are at, what files are you copying etc.
"- Document editors remembering unsaved changes."
This can be really annoying when I don't want to save these changes
But we did gain some nice things!
None of the gains you list have anything to do with user interfaces. They would all or mostly be possible in any of the older desktop environments shown.
The screenshots in the post include many old applications, sometimes jarring to modern sensibilities. I think it's fair to have a discussion here about the evolution of application UI too, no?
> Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings
Wasn’t that in Emacs for decades?
Yes. The macOS menu bar is also searchable, which is cool. Unity on Ubuntu also had this back in the day.
Most people haven't experienced "addressable interfaces" like Emacs and don't know what they're missing when they only have visuospatial navigability. I would like to see searching and jumping make bigger impacts in mainstream UX design.
KDE's global menu also has a search function like macOS/Unity. Tho only on Wayland for some reason.
Well, I guess it really is time for me to switch to Wayland, whatever the downsides.
Probably! To quote William Gibson, "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". I'm sure you can find some of these features all the way back in The Mother of All Demos, the difference now is that they're more common.
One of my biggest bugbears is losing the OK/Apply/Cancel concept with dialog boxes or settings windows. If I have a window with lots of settings that I want to experiment with then I've no problem with that setting taking effect immediately, but please give me the ability to back out all the changes I've tentatively made via a Cancel button.
I have a feeling you're in the minority. I've been using computers for 35+ years and I feel like I still don't understand OK/Apply/Cancel buttons. I still click Apply before clicking OK even if I know it's unnecessary.
Plus, I don't believe Cancel reverts changes the user made if they clicked Apply already. So your suggestion would go against how the UX of OK/Apply/Cancel has historically worked.
Yeah, me too. The Amiga had a good idea with its Preferences programs (i.e. settings or options) - a "Use" button, which only saves to memory, separate from the "Save" button, which also saves to disk. So even if you make a mess of it, just reboot. Of course, in those days we were used to rebooting often, so that wasn't an issue. But if the idea had caught on, then by now we'd probably also have a "Revert" option that copies from disk to memory and activates it.
My favorite is when I click a button to cancel an operation and a confirm dialog pops up where clicking “cancel” cancels the cancel.
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 earlier interfaces.
One thing that's also very noticeable to me: title bars are title bars and nothing else. It's just easy to grab windows and move them, resize them, etc. Nowadays I really struggle sometimes to find a place in (what should be) the titlebar to drag a window in many application.
We have lost indeed.
In Mac I use:
in order to enable dragging windows via `Cmd + Ctrl + Click`.YOU are awesome - thank you, that's a great tip!
It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.
I still want alt+underlined letter for menus.
Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.
> Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.
Not Ubuntu -specific. On all my setups alt+LMB moves, alt+RMB near any edge resizes that specific edge.
No need for pixel-perfect grabbing.
Yeah, this is the one thing about Linux I constantly miss when using anything else.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a thing for that...
Here's a maintained fork of one I used to use in another life: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
Microsoft's PowerToys did add that in (I think) the last version. Alt + Left click moves, alt + right click resizes.
Oh my gosh they actually did!
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/47024
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/powertoys/grab-and...
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 data and the interpretation, once I have that mental map and know where things roughly are.
While reading, I'm dragging or wheeling.
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.
You can do interesting things in the scroll bar. Some coding editors (like Visual Studio) cram a lot of useful information into the scroll bar.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...
For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)
Until some dolt decides to build "infinite scroll" - I've seen dragging the scrollbar with the mouse cause JS exceptions to be thrown on some pages. One for the UI hall of shame.
I don't think I've seen a JS exception like that, but it drives me nuts when I'm dragging the scrollbar down for a quick scan of the page contents (especially if it's images or huge product tiles), and at some point it suddenly loads more in, scrolls down a chunk further before I can let go of the mouse button, and then I don't know where the hell I was.
For scrolling large distances in large documents, that's an important use case to me. As an indication of progress is another important use case, but also as an indication to show the size of the document relative to the viewport.
> I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar?
Almost every time. Scrolling with the mouse has bugs in Windows (focus on the active field) and fine grained scrolling is not possible with the mouse.
I don't think we've lost these things so much as our preferences have now become a minority where once we were the majority. It seems completely normal. With the barrier to entry dropping, designs now match what is appealing to the largest number. Linux DEs are still quite customizable, and we're fortunate that niche desires can still be met there.
Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.
I think the parent is lamenting the lack of this in a commercially viable DE, like MacOS or Windows.
As much as it pains me to say it: custom Linux distros are not often deployed en masse. Especially not the ones that “look old”.
SerenityOS is the most well known but it's a fully custom operating system of its own. For Linux you can install the chicago95 theme (includes a widget set for GTK+3) and the b00merang GTK+4 theme (doesn't help with excess padding unfortunately, but it still has proper high-contrast 3D for the widgets and color for the headerbar. The mobile-friendly responsive UX of new GTK+4 apps actually works great with the traditional 3D look.)
The latest KDE with a suitable theme actually comes quite close.
Just finding a drag able area of the window to reposition it is a huge pain.
I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
Irix 5 was so clean!
QNX too, I awe to that vision of the world.
Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/
At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.
ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is.
https://guidebookgallery.org/
More:
• <https://ui.codexpanse.com/>
• <https://history.vpon.me/>
Not for OS's specifically but this site is fascinating for examining diverse HUDs and GUIs
https://www.hudsandguis.com/
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 later, I mentioned this to someone, and he said it aloud and I realised that my mental effort to pronounce "HAWP-og" was completely wrong. To me, it sounds something more like "whore-porg".
The links at the left and the image links do work.
Thank you for all these links - brought back a ton of memories, especially the Whistler screenshots. I remember running those back in the day.
Obligatory Link to xkcd [0]
I'll be honest, 1053 might be my favourite xkcd comic ever, purely because it's so encouraging of sharing knowledge and learning new things. Always excided to see the lucky 10,000 mentioned in the wild.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
This is like porn for me :)
It's one of my favourite things, looking at and analyzing older interfaces. Some are lovely, some are cute, some are ugly, but most are... "naïve"? I love to think about the effort, the research, the trials and tribulations. I feel I will spend a great deal of time in this page!
> [..] lovely [..] cute [..] ugly [..] naive...
First and foremost to me those screenshots are somewhat disappointing as they can't match my memories. NeXT, BeOS, Irix, OpenLook, SunOS, Arthur (imagine the diversity)... they were SO awesomely impressive at insanely high multi-sync CRT resolution.
Reality simply can't match the mind's eye, at least not for me.
I was thinking exactly the same. IRIX on a great Sony CRT is still awesome to just look at, to this day (I have _few_ SGIs). HP Vue, Solaris.. the greats.
One that does seem to be an odd man out is Genera. What a concept.
The man behind this site is known for his skills of recoverying data from QIC tapes. Looking at the "Software Library" section makes me always wonder if it will be released at some point, since that there is some stuff that isn't on BitSavers or other sites.
I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.
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 best new thing, whether it's systemd, pulseaudio, wayland or pipewire, but generally things work OK and it's not like Windows today offers a significantly different experience.
Windows is beyond salvation at this point.
No thanks, I do not want Linux. I use Linux for my home servers and at work, and I'd like to keep it that way, at arm's length.
I don't know why people suggest Linux for desktop use at the first swoop. I dislike it. I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are, I dislike how edge cases that are handled straightforwardly on Windows just aren't on Linux. Things like high pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support, notebook battery life management, and more. The bazaar thing contributes to all of these sharp edges and jank.
And more importantly I dislike the sanctimony of the Linux community, I dislike the distribution and the linking model of most desktop distributions, I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first', unless a giant entity rewrites the entire user mode stack to provide a useful, straightforward, and mostly intuitive platform interface (that is, Android).
An OS is more than the kernel. It is the entire platform including user-mode libraries, toolkits, and applications. For all its faults, I find the Windows platform better than any Linux distro platform, except one.
> Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them.
What I listed aren't only hardware features; they are platform interfaces that can be programmed against to produce user-mode applications without having to muck around with kernel interfaces. In fact the less as a user or user-mode developer I have to work with the kernel, the better, and Windows provides a gigantic surface area for that.
I am happy with how Windows works, I like a Windows workflow, I like developing for and on Windows, I like gaming on Windows. I've used it for 26 years and broadly have no issues with it. It is a pretty superb platform which regressed after Windows 10, and about 99% of the problems with it are user-mode frameworks and applications, thin coats of paint. Windows isn't even close to 'beyond salvation'.
> I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first',
There are user-centric and dev-centric Linux distros. Windows is "Microsoft cloud onboarding" centric, and the experience has been dramatically degrading for years.
If that were not the case, why would senior executives at Microsoft say things like "we've heard you" and "we intend to reverse the suck in the coming year"? Even their management knows users hate the Win11 experience, and have placed it on their backlog....
> I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are...igh pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support
These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux. Out of the box I can output youtube videos to a dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon, which pulls up an interface reminescent of "Windows 7, when the mixer wasn't terrible".
The reasons not to use KDE these days are because you need Windows software (usually: edge, teams, Office), or especially because LibreOffice is terrible. The core desktop experience, however, is notably and demonstrably less jank than the mess that is Windows 11.
> These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux
They are not.
I use a KDE distribution at work. I regularly see GPU texture copy bugs like random lines across the middle of the display, or along the bottom edge. I use a 4K 144 Hz 16:9 display, and the Linux platform absolutely struggles with getting the scaling, resolution, and colour depth on all the dozens of GUI toolkits correct. Subpixel antialiasing doesn't work on many applications. It doesn't matter if I am using Wayland or X; both are bad experiences.
> dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon
Speaking of sound... Linux doesn't even pick up my Audient interface unless I physically reinsert the USB cable. It doesn't have a channel or volume control for audio feedback from my mic to my outputs. If I change the output volume slider down from 100%, the actual volume output is asymmetric—one channel is considerably louder than the other at 50%.
I have experienced issues with wpa_supplicant, iwd/iwctl, and systemd-networkd fighting each other. Why are there even so many network managers? Why does the platform not provide one?
I will disagree until the cows come home that any Linux desktop interface (again, bar Android... but like I said, Android is almost an entirely different platform) is less jank than Windows. People bring up Windows' old UIs, but said UIs still work. gpedit.exe, regedit.exe, msc.exe, services.exe, ncpa.cpl, perfmon.exe, windbg.exe, these are things that haven't changed in nearly 3 decades.
It is a pity that your Linux experience is spoiled by so many bugs. I just want to say that I'm using it for recent years and encountered none of the issues you mention. In fact, my overall experience is butter smooth, regarding hardware support.
Right now my laptop is connected to 4K Dell display and it works perfectly in clamshell mode. I never saw any random lines across the middle of display, GPU acceleration seems to work fine, WebGPU in my Chromium browser works fine, video decode accelerated so 4K video eats a tiny bit of CPU. I can't say anything regarding color depth, everything seems to work fine for me. My display reports "3840x2160, 60Hz 30bit" info. I'm using 2x scaling and fonts are rendered properly (not blurry) in all applications I'm using.
My WiFi is configured using NetworkManager, I don't have iwd installed and systemd-networkd is not enabled. It somewhat helps that I'm using Arch and I decide what to install and what to enable.
I agree that Android provides much more polished system and I'd be happy to switch to desktop Android if that ever will be a thing. I don't like Linux desktop. It's just the only desktop operating system that does not suck for me.
You're mentioning a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the UI, and also, when it comes to wifi, that most people don't have any problems with.
Android has a horrible interface.
I'm not a regular KDE user, but it's a different universe than a barely customizable interface filled with generational cruft with garbage over the top of it spitting ads at you, saving everything to the cloud, etc.
Most Linux desktops are quiet. They may be a little buggy at times, but Windows is just as buggy at times.
the worst she could say is no
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 Web or Windows when those two will work forever, but on Linux you have to keep up with the endless treadmill of X11 to Wayland, GTK 2 to 3 to 4, Qt 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, pulseaudio to pipewire, etc., and if you miss just one you may as well give up.
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).
I would recommend WindowBlinds to achieve the "grey, boxy UI" look. As for a Windows 2000 theme out of the box, I am not sure, but I know it can make your Windows 10/11 UI look and behave like Windows XP.
There is a custom skin editor as well, so you can tailor the look of Windows to anything you choose, so you can probably get very close to the Windows 2000 look you are seeking.
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/
Cheers. Some of the themes look pretty good! I used to use StarDock Start and StartIsBack back when I was using Windows 8 to, well, get the Windows 7 Aero theme and the start menu back.
That being said I do notice that many of the rounded corners aren't fully transparent...
> I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React
I know that you said "no React" but you might want to try ReactOS. Of course if you don't need Windows-specific driver support Linux+Wine might suffice for your needs.
ReactOS does not have the features that the parent specifically asked for (and that you quoted). It’s also far from being usable as a production OS.
What the parent wants doesn’t exist, it’s interesting to see people give suggestions for alternatives. It’s clear that their priority are these underlying features and they wish it had a boxy grey UI, not that the boxy grey UI is the only requirement and everything else is optional.
Go with Win 10 LTSC or use Win Server as a daily. Both are crap-less and can be fully debloated in minutes.
Windows 10 doesn’t have the UI that the parent is asking for. Windows 7 was the last one that had that. Windows 11 isn’t much different in terms of UI from Windows 10 after tweaking a couple of things.
https://techsanjeetyt.com/make-windows-10-look-like-windows-...
You can’t get back the Classic Windows look in Windows 10 that was still fully supported in Windows 7.
That's the v5 release in a few months
I'm currently running Windows 10 Enterprise with a volume key from my alma mater. When I eventually upgrade to 11, either Server or LTSC is on my radar.
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.
I dont know about Win11, but in Win10, it is still there. You can see it in MDI apps and, in a few rare circumstances, I have seen the window manager seemingly crash and flash the old Win2000-style boxy design before going back to what it currently does.
Microsoft is really good at supporting the old libraries and GUIs etc (is the Windows 3.11 font picker still there?) - the problem is that modern programs aren't built to the W2K paradigm so even if you force W11 to "look" like windows 2000 all the apps will not suddenly grow title bars, etc.
Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard.
For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.
Nothing beats a 40 year nostalgia in the morning!
Except missing that sock and falling down into the dog's path and understanding the concept of fighting like cats and dogs.
I just found out that the theme song is on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)
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 later I still think it's cumbersome to have to look and press at bottom left to see all the programs every time.
[1] proportions and locations can be set
Also, a "sweep" button that quickly clears the desktop into a "desktop archive." I do that manually anyway with my own "sweep" folders. Every few months I delete and categorize within the sweep folder. Keeping the desktop clean and organized is the new frontier, especially as screens become smaller and people don't want to lose flow.
Verbose response, but what are your thoughts? Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify?
Mice and keyboards are just so passe, right, but I wouldn't go so far as getting a brain chip? Maybe a spherical "touchball" that senses the pressure of each finger to move a cursor? Trackballs are too laborsome. I have my mouse on maximum sensitivity and acceleration anyway.
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.
> 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.
You say that, but I have seen in the wild a scroll gesture to increase or decrease the value of a telephone number.
Wasn't even capped at zero, so I could scroll to a negative (phone) number.
"are going to find it a disaster."
True, it's not a good solution and there is Subvocal Recognition (SVR) that detects electrical signals in the neck or jaw using pads. Hall effect keyboards are pretty good in terms of sensitivity I find.
Lip reading by HAL was also a disaster for Frank Poole.
Maybe a large screen that can easily be flipped vertical/horizontal would work well. People already do it with the their smartphones - why not stationary screens? Have the OS detect when it happens so it can make any predetermined layout changes. Maybe have it rotate using a small motor? Cable connections into a base unit to avoid entanglement.
In terms of screens - I think two volume dials to adjust for brightness and another one for blue-light would be ideal. It should be super easy to do at a hardware level. On 24 hour programs if really pedantic. Maybe an external "volume dial" pad that can be plugged into a USB-C would be suffice and it could have a light and movement sensor as well to take a computer out of (and into) suspend and set the desired brightness according to the environment.
There are rechargeable closet lights that already have movement and light sensors - just need to adapt it to a screen.
> Maybe a large screen that can easily be flipped vertical/horizontal would work well. People already do it with the their smartphones - why not stationary screens? Have the OS detect when it happens so it can make any predetermined layout changes. Maybe have it rotate using a small motor? Cable connections into a base unit to avoid entanglement.
Good news: all of this except the motorization is already available from Dell and others. Common office setup. I often see people with one screen in portrait format for reading documents.
I just turn off desktop icons. Bam! Problem of messy desktop goes away.
But how would I find notebook_file(12).txt?
[dead]
You would really dedicate half the screen to something we use like 5% of the time?
Not half, less than that, but I'd have the most commonly used things automatically become the most prominent.
There could also be a feed/notification/realtime panel built into it for programs to insert into. I'd also have a bottle shown there, and I could talk to the genie that lives there. Everytime it wanted to talk, the color would change.
Or just a prompt/chat box.
What would you suggest? Maybe a start window that opens to full screen on the off-chance it's pressed? They're fairly fidgety things, right?
Previously:
Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 - June 2023 (55 comments)
Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 - Dec 2017 (58 comments)
I miss the old days. Thirty years ago, 64MB of RAM was considered a thing (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.in...)
With the way RAM prices are going we aren't far from that.
Wait till you see the UI the Amiga could run in 1 measly MiB of RAM. You could even run a sophisticated shell, multitasked along with everything else.
Seeing these brought back a flood of memories. Logging onto AOL through GeoWorks for the first time. Clicking that tiny lit apartment window in the Macintosh mouse tutorial and watching the curtain peel back to reveal a couple dancing inside. Mesmerized by the soft shade on OS/2 buttons like they were works of art (yes, I know that’s weird). Bringing my NeXTstation into the office when I was just a lowly game tester and getting that look from my boss.
Those really were magical days.
NextStep interface still looks sleek and timeless. No doubt a decaying Apple went to acquire them. Having seen some NextStep demos online, it was way ahead of its time. Few weeks ago just started to use WindowMaker again on one of my VMs.
Absolutely!
I wish projects like nextspace could get more love.
That page does not include VMS DECwindows Motif, so here is a link:
https://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/OpenVMS.html
VMS DECwindows Motif 1.0 was released in August 1991; it is difficult for me to comprehend that was 35(!) years ago. I still have a mouse pad from the release party.
There is the very similar Ultrix version:
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5...
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.
He also got Parallax p/NeWS in his collection, which is super rare. I also wrote a person who has a SunDew QIC cassette, and another that has various NeWS sources (including the portable REF tree of the 1.1 version). Unfortunately they haven't released them yet, because of the unknown copyright situation. Another person has the OpenWindows 1.0 binary tapes for Sun-3 and Sun-4, among other stuff.
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/bagley-nottingham-tapes
For now we have the sources of NeWS 1.1 (and operators.h if you look more in depth) and X/NeWS 2.0. I also have the RBuss sources (an incomplete clone), but I have to ask the author if they can be put on the internet.
P.S: check BitSavers and Don Hopkins archives...
Thank you for the pointers!
> Unfortunately they haven't released them yet, because of the unknown copyright situation.
I’m guessing that’s a euphemism for “almost all software archival work[1] is, technically, illegal enough to ruin the life of everyone who touches it”. This includes stuff like the Space Cadet Pinball for Linux that was on the front page recently and had approving comments from the original programmers. (I believe pre-commercialization Unix is one of the rare exceptions, assuming you ignore the copyrights of everyone who sent their patches to Bell Labs unofficially, as both the authors of those patches and the Bell Labs folks did.)
And it’s fair and probably correct to be afraid here. I just want to point out that this is one of the places where “legal” and “ethical” unequivocally point in opposing directions, and waiting for the legal situation to become more favourable is pretty much equivalent to never doing it. Software has the misfortune of having happened after the advent of pervasive copyright, so there are no out-of-copyright old masters that we could legally base our art on.
Any chance of getting them to donate the code anonymously to one of the willing sacrifices^W^W well-known community figures like Jason Scott?
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/
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 through those UIs?
Just some ranting here but it's shockingly better than what I have currently on Mac
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!
I live for Old UNIX screenshots, you just made my day, my week, my month ... ok my year! Thanks!
I also love to collect old xpm icons from that era, and try and assemble arcane FVWM configs that weave them in.
Oh, NsCDE is a great start if anyone wants to emulate some of the Solaris screenshots in the collection.
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5... <-- XV! I used that back in the day. Does anyone remember gv too? GhostView? Another great Motif application for pdf documents.
Reviewing the screenshots here, I realize profoundly that something about the idealism of the 1990s is baked into them; the 1990s a time before the bad vibes of commercialism mostly destroyed the interwebs.
OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?
The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).
Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.
Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.
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.
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.
The monitors of the time were a lot blurrier than the screen you're looking at the screenshots on. For maximum verisimilitude you'd have to have photographs of screens.
I got an 800x600 LCD monitor in about 1999, and it was a massive upgrade.
It's a tradeoff. A 800x600 CRT will look "blurry" compared to a LCD when rendering old-style GUIs or text in a properly hinted font, but the 800x600 LCD will look blocky and pixelated when rendering a real-world photorealistic image compared to the CRT. The real look of that CRT is more like taking that old 800x600 photo and upscaling it to 1440x1080 on a modern FullHD display. Blurry to be sure, but not blocky or pixelated. Early LCDs also had terrible image persistence/ghosting issues that showed up when playing games.
I think the factor here is that the screens were CRTs.
Font rendering was better. Today the fonts are scaled up or down or both and the rendering is hit or miss.
So happy to have been along for that ride.
This collection is a great complement to the everything-x86 PC workstation jungle of the day.
I built a huge tower PC server to run NeXTStep in 1993, but I had no idea how difficult hardware comparability would be. It was a journey. But things improved quickly. So I installed lots of these: OS/2, Windows NT, NextStep, BeOS, Linux, various BSDs.
I found a Computer Shopper from that time. I'm pretty sure I bought one of the tower cases from page 786. Great stuff. Tell them I sent you!
https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-march-1993/
It's funny how early some things do and don't look familiar. A decent chunk of unix-family OSs have changed some since then, but also kinda not. CDE 1.0 looks almost exactly like the latest version:)
I'm struck how it used to be _almost_ universal that the active window title bar stands out visually from the other ones.
Nostalgic for VAXstation/DECwindows terminals where at the time the monitor weighed more than I did.
Them beOS icons were lovely at the time
Check out Haiku.
God beOS is the absolute peak of pixel-based UI design. It's like what Metal Slug was for pixel art games. Someone needs to add a CRT filter button to the site.
great list, would be cool to see each OS evolving over time.
NextStep/OSX was the only desktop OS that did not feel like a downgrade from Amiga Workbench
It's not listed here and maybe I'm just nostalgic for the computer labs from elementary/middle school but Windows 2000 was so peak
I think the NT4/2000 desktop was pretty perfect. It laid down everything without getting in your way. A lot of early systems were forced to follow simplicity because of lack of resources. This coincidentally led to better interfaces because complexity is difficult to get right and often is in service of business interests instead of technical interests.
I think its obvious that there's a degradation in business products as they age. They become more 'competitive' which means more profit-seeking, so the marketing end of things takes over and the engineering end takes a back seat. Simplicity is replaced with shiny and complexity to catch more edge case sales. Weird cargo cults emerge, product manager cults of personality, etc instead of following proper usability guidelines. Industry fads become self-fulfilling prophecies. Lockdowns and walled gardens emerge because they are more profitable than open systems.
Today, I almost can't believe how hostile and bloaty Windows 11 is and MacOS isn't much better. At least we have FOSS, but the commercial end of things is 'late stage' and frankly awful.
There's a real tragedy how capitalism always leads here. I sometimes wonder if the USSR stuck around what a more technocratic-led system would produce compared to the West.
I distinctly remember, and found, the NeWS (Network extensible windowing sisten), where you could develop with PostScript(TM) for application windows.
Over time much NeWS related stuff resurfaced, wheter are application binaries, sources (both application and the server itself) or documentation, so anyone could play with them on a real machine (Sun-3 or SPARC) or inside QEMU SPARC. I'm waiting for a copy of "Portable NeWS 1.0" to be recovered, to see how much different the sources are compared to the 1.1 version.
I also hope to see resurface binaries/sources of other server implementations, Sun Symbolic Programming Environment (which includes code originally developed at Schlumberger, including LispScript), the sources of the PdB compiler, CMU Andrew wm (although is not directly related, is the ancestor of this window system, from the same authors), and whatever is related to this system.
It would be interesting a revival like Interlisp.
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 appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.
In some ways X11 with it's focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus, select:middle click paste features provide a far more refined desktop experience then mac or windows ever could. No wait, stop laughing, sure X11 was a garbage fire when it came to consistent professional design, but because it was such a wild west of an environment there was place for real ui innovation. I know, I get grumpy fast without middle click paste. And I hate having to raise a window in order to click and type on it(A common access pattern for me is to read docs on the top window while I am operating the bottom window).
Cut-buffer (the middle click) I just can't live without. People that never experienced that still get awestruck with the ease and effortlessness.
And virtual desktops/workspaces also had that awe-effect back then. Although with multimonitor setups this faded a bit.
Yes Aqua was quite striking. Also much more consistent than the rag bag of different styling you see on Windows or Mac today.
Even before those, AfterStep, Enlightenment and many others were really nice.
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.
Screenshots -- or GIFs -- of Plan 9 compared with Inferno would be most instructive.
The Plan 9 folks I've talked to are a bit shocked by this, but I preferred Inferno's GUI to plain old Rio/Acme etc.
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?
It's nice to see some of these things and finally make out any contents! I've felt hurt by Wikipedia's somewhat odd and sad screenshot policy, which makes it impossible to see any details of the things I've been looking at recently, like early Windows NT.
They do that on purpose with proprietary apps to avoid copyright complaints.
Let's talk about the HP-9000 as depicted in http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-u...
There is a `man` entry displayed in a terminal window there. The first Unix I've ever touched was HP-UX on an HP-9000 (server series, not the workstation one), and I have this memory that the underlined words you can see in that manpage as well were actually hyperlinks you can select and would bring you to the relevant section of the manpage that discussed that term. Am I fabricating that memory or is it real? I cannot find any info about it on the Internet.
I started with HP-UX 9.03 on a PA-RISC-powered 715-75 (to use Emacs, our whole research group logged into the 735 server to edit there, which was faster than running it locally).
Any unclean pointer fiddling in C, and the process was terminated by the OS, so the machine was wonderful to use as a development box (especially with Purify installed) for software that would later be run on Windows or Linux.
I eventually bought my own refurbished (and using academic discount) 715 (instead of a car), so I had the fastest machine in our student dorm of anyone I knew, undergrad, grad student or professor. I could just write my Master's thesis when everyone else kept re-installing Windows - the HP never crashed in 6.5 years, which has left me with deep respect for the old-schol (pre-Compaq) HP engineers. The machine (21" color CRT) occupied half of my 9 square metre dorm room, but it also kept me warm.
My 'first Unix' was MIPS Risc/OS, and it had that feature too.
I thought only `info` had hyperlinks
In the GNU world, indeed. And that's why it makes even harder for me to remember exactly, it was 30 years ago, I was clueless and also Linux was already "big enough" to have some Red Hat installed in some x86 PC in the same lab.
>you'll dance to anything by toad the wet sprocket. loser.
love a good screenshot easter egg
Try this out for all of KDE to CDE window theming needs:
https://github.com/spacestate1/cde-plasma
Here's a good starting point for those of us that use XFCE:
https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1231025/
I love old desktop OSes so much I've created a Windows 3.1 theme for mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295
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.
I remember using some kind of software around the time of windows xp i think, that could replace the chrome/shell so you could design your own GUI entirely – but I can't remember what it was called! I spent a lot of time iterating and experimenting back then, replacing iexplore.exe or whatever the main process was called.
Are you thinking of WindowBlinds / Stardock?
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/
I seem to remember it was available at the same time as the Winamp skins / viz craze.
Resource Hacker?
The aspect ratios were much "taller" back then, which was kind of better for editing code. All these late 90s designs were near NTSC at the time - aspect ratios like 1.25:1 (1280x1024) or 1024x768 (1.33:1). Monitors have always followed TVs, since displays now are the "HD" ratio of 16:9 (1.77:1), or 16:10 if we're lucky. But we do get way more pixels now anyway.
Use portrait displays! You'll never complain about the height again. Use 1440p (or scaled equivalent) and the width won't be an issue either. Many displays make this easy (all the Dells I've had can rotate), and adequate rotating stands aren't necessarily expensive.
There's even maybe some Actual Scientific Evidence to justify the switch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638928
Sun Solaris PPC (CDE) takes me back. I've built plenty of 3G/WCDMA telephony code on that thing. It never let me down.
No https version of this site, I configured my browser to warn or block non https websites, since from my experience few of those tried to force download (what i can only assume to be viruses) to my computer
I understand that https can do that to, but its usually the none https that does, so its a decent configuration to have
Please consider making the site https
It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other!
System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.
+1. The idea of making tiling + floating a first class citizen was the best decision they made.
For anyone pining for innovation in Desktop, a small part of this culture is still alive in Ricing competitions.
A recent favorite of mine is this one. Timestamp starts at the final submission being reviewed: https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557
Compare https://deskto.ps/
While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.
I'm sure someone reading this thread has UAE handy in order to contribute a screenshot of AmigaOS/Workbench 1.x.
Regarding Amiga screenshots, they've taken care to get the DigiPaint aspect ratios right, but the Workbench 2.04 screenshot is in a resolution that comes from an add-in graphics card rather than the Amiga's custom chips. It's a resolution Workbench wasn't graphically designed for, so it looked wrong in such a resolution at the time. If you double the screenshot's height, then everything (text, icons, window gadgets etc) looks right.
It would be more representative of the OS, and the era, to have a height-doubled "HiRes" screenshot, 640x200 or 640x256.
The aspect ratio is correct on all screenshots and are accurate de-interlaced representations of a 640x400/512 workbench setup, even though these particular screenshots are in RTG dimensions. Starting with ECS, the Amiga was also capable of true non-interlaced 640x400 output (and even 480 vertical lines unless I misremember) in what was commonly called "productivity mode", limited to 4 colors (2 bitplanes).
Interlaced workbench setups weren't uncommon. I ran such on and off for years for certain productivity stuff where I wanted more screen real estate, until I decided to spend money on a flicker-fixer.
> The aspect ratio is correct
Yes it is, was my post unclear? Following your suggestion that someone might contribute a screenshot of 1.x, which I agree would be a nice addition, I'm suggesting a "HiRes" screenshot of 2.x or 3.x would be a better representation of how it looked in-period to the vast majority of users. The point is just that the icons, text, and general UI chrome were designed for that lower vertical resolution.
I ran the interlaced modes later after buying a flicker-fixer, but didn't know of anyone who used them without one - the flicker meant those interlaced modes weren't generally considered to be very usable.
Even the site with its NeXTStep style (love it).
I was still in school when OS/2 came out. I read about it in the magazines never touching it myself. I was impressed with its aesthetics but never knew with the clout of IBM why it never took off. My guess is internal politics killed OS/2 more than Microsoft?
Internal politics, yeah, maybe; because IBM certainly didn’t do much to market it. That, and bundling deals Microsoft had with OEM hardware vendors (if you want the discount, then Windows has to go on every machine). OS/2 advertised a “better Windows than Windows”. Problem was, software vendors then said, “great, now we don’t have to do an OS/2 port!”
Yes. But with IBM’s war chest at the time, it could have undercut anything Microsoft offered.
Year of release for each would be extra awesome.
The BeOS aesthetic has aged so well. I'll always wonder what might've been had they not been deliberately smothered in the crib (or at the very least if Apple had chosen to acquire them).
Lifestreams was also an interesting take on a desktop UI back in the day
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I miss on the list Counterpoint GUI for Amstrad PCs with MS-DOS
https://www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/Counterpoint/index.html
https://networkencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/n...
Surprised Enlightenment didn't make the cut while fvwm is there
I miss my GEM desktop and products. They were so ahead of their time. And Ventura publisher! I made some school projects using that. Brings back some good memories.
> 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?
What wonderful memories, have a vivid one of working on a computer at Kinkos using the old System 7 (Mac OS 8) UI. Thanks :)
I was not ready to start my day with a OS/2 Warp nostalgia feeling
So much gray, even when the hardware could do color. Perhaps for compatibility with other hardware or get out of the way?
I was looking for Atari TOS
Well, that was an unexpectedly emotional trip through most of my nerd life to date lol
I hated magenta-blue CGA graphics soooo sooo much as a kid. It was (and still is IMHO) the ugliest thing I ever saw on a computer, by far.
I had a monitor that had a switch in the back that would change those colors to red-yellow-green. It was still awful but at least it was less awful than white-magenta-blue
What a wonderful resource! HP VUE has interesting color choices and a nice "Dock"
Nice walk through history. So many people trying to be the next big thing.
Sometime I wish time goes slower
The HPC Integral PC has a fascinatingly compact design... by necessity.
VUE was so excellent looking it makes me want to run CDE today.
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.
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’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use.
That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.
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, the entire thing. This was not normal in the day. Or that NS used Display PostScript. "Not only are they moving the entire window, they're using DPS to do it!" PostScript was powerful, and expensive, and for printers. Yet, here it was.
Or how fast BeOS was, and its cool filesystem, and other aspects.
It's certainly an interesting question to ask folks that have opinions simply on the cosmetics of the various images that we see here, but appreciate that for the folks that "were there", at least for me, I'm not just remembering what it looked like, it's much more than that.
I will never forget when the Mac first came out, my friend and I went to see one at a computer store. And my friend just sat there, mouth agape, moving the mouse back and forth across the menubar, seeing them popup and popdown as it moved, and just going "Woooowwww".
I remember the shock of using a Mac SE after using DOS on a PC. Despite the tiny screen on the SE, it was an absolute revelation.
> 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.
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
25 is a very distant memory. ;0)
I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds).
Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.
>Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing
I don't know about. All the different apps and OS windows are so inconsistent with each other. There is not much sense of an overall aesthetic. Just a mishmash of vaguely similar styles.
Basing one's opinion on how a static screenshot looks, is the reason we've moved towards pretty looks and away from usability concerns.
As other commentors have said, the overriding concern with these older OSs was to make them as easy as possible to use. It would never have crossed these developers' minds to, for example, hide the scrollbar because they think it looks ugly.
Looking at a screenshot doesn't really tell you anything if you're not familiar with it, but it's a nice reminder of using that software for those who are.
In most of the comments here, I'm not seeing "nostalgia" or "the love for youth". I'm seeing frustration with how the carefully researched and developed principles have been forgotten.
For some of these, you have to use them on the actual hardware to understand why so many of us are bummed about what we have lost. The latency of modern systems is kind of bonkers. Even though the machines were incredibly slow they feel faster than modern machines. Some musicians used Atari STs for years after they were discontinued because of the stable timing.
For others, the hardware wasn't important, but some of the functionality isn't apparent in a static screenshot. For example, I loved OS/2 and the Workplace Shell. It had functionality similar to Windows COM or CORBA in that everything on the system exposed an interface that could be easily scripted or used by other applications. The built-in scripting language was Rexx which I feel could have played the role Python does now if only OS/2 had taken off. Using OS/2 from 1.3 onwards felt like you were using a computer from the future.
I'm under 30 at least and I do feel nostalgia for these albeit not having used most of them. First OS I ever used must have been Windows 95. I wish we could all go back to Windows 7, that was the best OS ever imo.
Hi! I'm slightly under that so I feel like I'm qualified :)
I wholeheartedly agree, they're quite a regression.... although I don't think this is a popular opinion around here.
When people say "something used to be better" they usually don't mean literally, they mean that for the circumstances, it was better. Of course, more modern systems support more hardware, more features, etc., but if you made those same modern technical improvements on top of an older designs, you'd get much better results.
To me it looks like software design has been massively overtaken by "form over function", everyone just wants a unique "brand" but the actual UX is complete dogshit. Borderless buttons, zero indication what's clickable, no visual delimiters for different areas of programs, no good shortcut / altkey menu support, etc....
This has somehow infected even Linux to such a crazy extent...
I'm 23 and IMO, the Windows desktop style peaked somewhere in Windows 95-2000. The first Windows I ever used was XP, so I'm mostly making that decision based off screenshots and emulators.
UIs back then were dense, didn't waste large amounts of space in a misguided attempt to be "minimalist", and had affordances for ease of use. There was no scrollbar hiding, no animations that made the user wait for no reason other than the designer's ego, very visible borders on windows and buttons that made finding/resizing them easier, large bars at the top of windows that let you move them around, and actual text for most buttons instead of icons that are anyone's guess what they mean. Thankfully some of this can be dialed back in the Windows 11 accessibility settings, at least for missing scrollbars and getting rid of time wasting animations, but a lot of programs don't respect those.
That's right there is a good indicator for which programs care about their users. I'm using your program because I want to actually do something, not waste time watching your designers show off.
I've disabled animations on my Android phone too, and it gives an extremely noticable speedup. Menus appear right when I click them, instead of a second later as they slide into existence. Too bad iPhones just replace the slide with a fade of equal duration; disrespect for the user's time like that is yet another reason I will never buy one.
Those older GUIs didn't try to hide the filesystem hierarchy either. It infuriates me to no end when I use a new OS and have to hunt down the way to show the disk root, or filename extensions, or hidden files. MacOS was especially bad; I had to look up a freaking keyboard shortcut that I never would have found on my own. The common reason is so "normal people" can use the interfaces, but I think that's infantilizing and is why tons of Gen Z don't know what files or folders are. Most people can learn .docx means a Word document, and C:\Users\TheirName is where their files are.
(Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it. People will just go right back to Windows 11 because it's somehow better.)
There's some improvements possible, for sure. I'd like to see some programs put hint letters over buttons when you press a modifier like Ctrl so you can easily see what the shortcuts are. I don't know of any that do, but it'd be very useful for more complex software like drawing programs or word processors.
edit: typo
> Notable shoutout, the GNOME open/save dialogs are the absolute worst. I wish distros wouldn't default to it.
I'll never understand who in their right mind would think that in a save dialog, if I start typing, I mean to search for something instead of trying to change the name of the file. It's really baffling.
Risc OS is the GOAT
where's desqview? I ran my first BBS on that back in the 90s before switching over to OS/2 Warp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
That Wikipedia article needs a better screenshot. Otherwise, very interesting. And DESQview/X was X Window System on DOS with pre-emptive multitasking, wow.
Anyone here remember dos? The og CLI bases OS
I offer a modern distro of a DOS. :-) So yes.
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
It is depressing how little has changed.
I love how little df has changed since 1985.
Deeply nostalgic! Thanks for sharing.
GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. I first saw this on a friends' parents computer and was quite astonished why computers may look like that. I was very used to Windows/DOS back then.
I am also glad to have switched to Linux in 2004 already. Once you have been using Linux for a while, whenever I use windows I am annoyed at how slow it is. Just file copy operations alone and then billion excuses windows developers make, trying to copsplain why it is so slow. When I have to backup 30GB, I don't want an explanation why it is slow - I simply use what is faster. And that's just one advantage of many more Linux has. (I use the commandline most of the time though, so KDE and GNOME are IMO just pointless eyecandy these days.)
> GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems.
Yes, it does. So much so that Apple noticed and sued.
I gave some links in:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121011
That brings back memories from pre press days and the SGI Indigo machines. They did some heavy lifting for the time.
Impressive collection
That beos yellow..
in 30 years someone will do this with LLMs
Amazing resource!
Is that an illustration of the Canadian museum of history made in Corel Draw I spy?
The Cambrian period of operating systems and GUIs.
"We have learned nothing in 10,000 years."
I don’t see any pie menus, so I’m leaning towards agreement...
Patents are very good at stifling progress and learning, even bogus ones.
Probably more accurately 40-45 years.
xfm from the first Slackware print, I really liked that file manager. But these days it fails to work. I tied many years ago to get it work but failed :(
"403 Forbidden"
No Mouse Desk [1], GEOS [2], or GS/OS [3]? Look what you did now, my Apple IIs are just crying in the corner..
1.https://imgur.com/a/h6dxDRv (circa 1985)
2. https://imgur.com/a/IlJSlJT (circa 1986)
3. https://imgur.com/a/AIo3jdk (circa 1988)
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All of them look much, much better than Windows 10, Windows 11, Android or iOS although all run on less powerfull hardware.
But using only one level of library to draw on the screen "is so lame'. /s