The user experience is so (paradoxically) refreshing. Back then you could fit so much useful information and controls into a single screenful; interfaces responded instantly; it was easy to figure where things are and what I'm looking at. With "modern" UIs, you can't get a big picture of what you're working on because there is so much white space and scrolling; the application is slower than your fingers; with each application, you have to learn the designer's "vision" in order to figure out where things are and what you're looking at.
I wish this nostalgic myth would die. Back in the Win 9x days we all had laughably slow spinning disks and hardly any RAM. Interfaces for simple programs like Minesweeper and Notepad were instant, sure. But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s, mostly thanks to SSDs. (Visual Studio is a notable exception - they really screwed it up after 6.0.)
It is no myth. Go try a Windows 2000 system and compare it to today. Windows 2000 will respond a lot faster (often instant), even on complex applications.
It's a biased viewpoint, but it's not nostalgia. The following all happened to me:
- 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.
- ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel debugging and full memory view.
- DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software? Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable machine.
You'll notice a common thread. It was possible to outrun the demons of sluggishness back then.
when you click save or when memory has to be paged/loaded, etc, yes.
when it comes to responding to user input - while memory is being swapped, yes.
in contrast, even when the computer wasn't responding, it never lost keystrokes. I'd type ahead and then the characters would appear when it was ready.
now, the windows computer just randomly loses characters and loses focus for no reason. if it's not paying attention when you're typing or clicking, it just won't respond.
But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed: if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to use the fast lane.
Also consider that companies balance a number of factors: costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and first to launch.
Unsure what exactly counts as "looks nice" but I'll often add an intentional delay to buttons whose actions are near instantaneous but not great to do multiple times so that you don't accidentally click it twice.
I think it's pretty cool that the source code is all in a single file called app.js, and it's just doing simple DOM manipulations, no React, no minification, no libraries. I like to think it's just written like that too, a gigantic file that the author just iterates on.
And that's the "magic" that makes it so snappy and fast to load. I built a web-based game just like that and I am confident that my choice not to use any of the "modern web dev stack" is the reason I managed to hit my 60 FPS performance target on an iPhone 6s in 2024.
Thanks, and yes thats exactly how it happened. I just made it originally for myself and i like my own stuff to be fast. And then over the weekend i thought it could be nice to just publish it (with some win2000 theme over it)
Strange how people are always so negative. Always with the nitpicking. Functionally of course 90s style UX and desktop productivity has always been far higher. Palantir's blueprint UI doesn't even specifically target mobile.
Yeah, seems many people can just moan online. At least I hope they aren't like this in daily life... It is pretty annoying how, while the HN audience grew steadily, from the 'wow great how you made this' went to 'this is crap and a joke' basically. Or maybe it's my memory and it was always quite bad, but then I don't really want to know; I find shooting down projects, unless they actually are super low effort (while asking money) or claiming blatant untruths (FOSS while it's not), is some kind of insecurity thing broken people do.
Of course reporting bugs is a good thing, but that's not just burning down someone's efforts willy nilly.
That is not an accurate reproduction of the classic Windows UI. The 3D bevels on buttons and other beveled elements are wrong and make it look more like Motif if anything.
I like it, and I laughed out loud when Clippy popped up. That bastard came out when my college ran everything from slow network drives. He'd bring the system to a grinding halt, unless you were on one of the few workstations with a local hard drive.
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I wish this nostalgic myth would die. Back in the Win 9x days we all had laughably slow spinning disks and hardly any RAM. Interfaces for simple programs like Minesweeper and Notepad were instant, sure. But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s, mostly thanks to SSDs. (Visual Studio is a notable exception - they really screwed it up after 6.0.)
I strongly disagree.
- 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.
- ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel debugging and full memory view.
- DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software? Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable machine.
You'll notice a common thread. It was possible to outrun the demons of sluggishness back then.
when it comes to responding to user input - while memory is being swapped, yes.
in contrast, even when the computer wasn't responding, it never lost keystrokes. I'd type ahead and then the characters would appear when it was ready.
now, the windows computer just randomly loses characters and loses focus for no reason. if it's not paying attention when you're typing or clicking, it just won't respond.
At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed: if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to use the fast lane.
Also consider that companies balance a number of factors: costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and first to launch.
Some calculation intensive parts sure are thanks to modern CPU with plenty of cache and RAM and multiple cores.
GUI on the other hand are often atrocious
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Of course reporting bugs is a good thing, but that's not just burning down someone's efforts willy nilly.
https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
Impressive!