Does anyone else miss simple gray GUIs? There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing. I would love to have an editor theme for it (IntelliJ / vs code / terminal.app).
Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though? It's rare to see the abominations that used to roam, especially in the Flash era. Web designers generally follow mostly the same principles and design language. Windows is the only place where it's still a bit wild west.
I sure do. Modern OS UIs might be visually rich and feature-packed, but this definitely came at the cost of clarity and efficiency. Because I do a lot of writing, I keep an old thinkpad and an old PowerBook running NT 4 and Mac OS 9 respectively. There's just something about those grays and the straightforward, no-nonsense UIs that allows me to work without distractions. I can't say the same thing about my macbook and all of its colorful superfluous features. Of course, since those OSes are ancient, it's more difficult to access the internet which also helps quite a lot with me being more focused on my work.
> There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing.
That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?
in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.
and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.
REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)
While I appreciate the flashbacks you just gave me, I don't think the enshittifaction of GUI:s is orthogonal to the evolution in not having to deal with hardware issues any more.
I miss the old Paintbrush application, it has a selective eraser. I remember me and my brother invented a mini-game where we drew a house with a dark green lawn and then ran the selective eraser using the arrow keys to mow the lawn and make it light green. I also miss the old times when an application took 0 seconds to load, loading solitaire in Windows 10 is a horrible user experience with loading times and bloated UI and ads.
OK, i don't associate old Windows PC with "applications taking 0 seconds to load". In fact, usually the disk drive would spring into action and it would take much longer than nowadays to load a 300kb application.
Impressive but the Microsoft product is now underwhelming. So many people here spent years of their life doing things with the wonder for its time that was WfW 3.11.
Think how many man years were wasted trying to configure autoexec.bat and config.sys.
The first decent OS that I came across was SGI's IRIX. Unlike every other OS GUI you could focus on your work, in your applications, and not be concerned with the OS. There was nothing to battle against. Operating systems should be invisible and enable you to do more important things, not an end to themselves.
I don't know why, but when I saw the bundle loading, my brain triggered the floppy disk reading sound into my ears in the background, I felt it and I miss the old days :)
Very cool to see there's still love for this era of computing. I still have a 486 set up, with Windows 3.11. I sometimes play minesweeper on it, or play around with Borland C++.
Readit News
Accessibility -> Display:
Appearance: Keyboard:I spent hours in QBasic when I was a teenager. Damn, that's ages ago!
That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?
Deleted Comment
in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.
and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.
REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)
yes, good ol days :-D
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Think how many man years were wasted trying to configure autoexec.bat and config.sys.
The first decent OS that I came across was SGI's IRIX. Unlike every other OS GUI you could focus on your work, in your applications, and not be concerned with the OS. There was nothing to battle against. Operating systems should be invisible and enable you to do more important things, not an end to themselves.
> The simplest API to run DOS/Win 9x