87 replies
1d17h
The peak of mouse-driven GUI was Windows 98. The icon designs, the customization, and the animation is unmatched even today.
45 replies
1d16h
Windows XP installation process seemed something similar.
I remember I was blown away the first time I installed from an ubuntu live cd.
19 replies
1d13h
I installed from a couple of graphical CDs around 2008 (... how did I even burn that first CD?) ... then shortly after that Linux finally made full-resolution TTYs work by default and I used text mode thereafter. Usually via `mini.iso` (since I install rarely, start with a small base system, and like not starting with out-of-date packages).
I'm trying not to have a panic attack that "Windows 98" unambiguously counts as retrocomputing now though.
17 replies
1d11h
I'm trying not to have a panic attack that "Windows 98" unambiguously counts as retrocomputing now though.
Oh you can totally go up to Windows XP for this denomination. Some would argue you may even go to 7.
Windows 10 is 9-10 years old and nobody ever cared or will ever be nostalgic about Windows 8 which is 12 years old so it’s not unreasonable to consider anything before that, "Retro".
11 replies
1d8h
I really can't believe Windows 10 is 10 years old and is still a heaping pile of trash. I'm so glad I switched to Mint 3 years ago after being pissed at Windows 10 for 3 years.
The only thing keeping me on Windows really was gaming, and all of that works perfectly for me thanks to Steam.
10 replies
1d7h
Is it really that bad? It doesn't have my preference either, but I've never really understood why people think it's that bad. Especially with Windows 11, it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo. The fact that it's spyware is a different discussion, I'm mainly talking about usability and stability here.
3 replies
1d6h
I still use 10 every day. I think detractors are mostly annoyed that its terminal facilities are still subpar out of the box (even with Windows Terminal).
2 replies
1d5h
I think detractors are mostly annoyed that its terminal facilities are still subpar out of the box (even with Windows Terminal).
All the spyware, forced updates and restarts causing loss of work forcing you to wrestle your own computer into submission via tweaking a plethora of knobs and levers that MS subverts with updates.
But terminals...
0 replies
1d4h
I restart once a month, when compulsory updates are rolled out, and it's hardly a sacrifice if user programs are half-decent (i.e. sessions are restored, something every good browser or editor can do these days).
As for spyware and subverted preferences, Apple does it worse; and many Linux updates will carelessly break DE stuff too... so it's all much of a muchness to me.
0 replies
1d4h
You can set "Active Hours" to include up to 18 hours of the day effectively limiting forced restarts to whenever you are sleeping. They also only seem to happen when you leave the computer idle. Combine this with hibernate and you can delay an update indefinitely.
It is still annoying to deal with but manageable especially on single boot machines.
3 replies
1d5h
Is it really that bad?
Yes! YES.
it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo
O_O
Good hypothetical gods.
Long term Windows user here, before I defected to Linux (supplemented with Mac OS X) in about 2002. I started on Windows 2.01 in 1988.
The best version of Windows ever was 2000, and it's been accelerating downhill since then. The last version that was pleasant to use, and the best-looking, was Windows 7. Win8.0 brought in the flat look that destroyed all visual appeal. Win 8.1 reinstated a broken crippled copy of the Start menu.
Win10 formalised that and it was minimally usable.
Now 11 is the one that I simply cannot bear to use at all.
Broken taskbar, glamorised into uselessless, pinned at the bottom when it should be at the side. Fitt's law making it easy to find the Start menu in a corner, a big easy target, broken: it now moves around floating somewhere left of bottom centre. It has advertising in it, in a paid product! WTAF? Ribbons everywhere, destroying the usability of the world-beating Explorer UI that the entire industry copied. The return of the deeply useless desktop widgets. The b0rked up MS web based video-conferencing tool is always there, always open, although I never ever use it. It constantly nags me about low free space in my never-used OneDrive, and I can't turn it off.
It is a horrible broken sh1tshow of an OS, the end of a proud dynasty.
I am really seriously shocked to find anyone might prefer it.
1 replies
1d4h
I am really seriously shocked to find anyone might prefer it.
Prefer it? Not really. The core issue is they keep changing the GUI metaphors. Now at this point if you click on the right program you may see stuff from win3.11 all the way up to win11. With some GUI's stuck in 'the window is a max of 640x480 mode' and is crap to use on a even semi recent computer. Then is as tradition MS moves junk around into non logical places. Even the task manager has had junk moved around for no real reason and it really does not look better or worse than the win10 version it was however an 'ok' improvement upon the old win9x style.
The win8 debacle was them not testing it on users and thinking everyone would have a touch tablet for windows?! It shows. Win9x and WinXP you can see they did their usability studies. Then just decided to not do it anymore. Discoverability is terrible, usability is skewed across at least 7 different windows idioms and things you are used to doing just randomly disappear and reappear somewhere else (if you are lucky). Then tools are deprecated and replaced with new shiny but do the exact same thing but not quite and usually surrounded by techno bable. Just fix the old ones and update it please. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...
The only reason I still use it is I am fairly committed to this eco system. Moving to another one is possible but not something I really want to do. Just upgrading a computer is a painful thing for me to do at this point much less changing to another OS. It gets more and more tempting as WINE gets better and better.
0 replies
3h38m
Moving to another one is possible but not something I really want to do. Just upgrading a computer is a painful thing for me to do at this point much less changing to another OS.
At some point the pain of moving will probably be less than the pain of these constant borkedness-upgrades.
And quite possibly that point is already somewhere in your past.
0 replies
22h57m
I only tolerate Windows 11 on my gaming machine because of Open Shell https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
1 replies
18h44m
Especially with Windows 11, it's honestly a nice visual improvement over 10 imo.
You gotta be joking.
IMO, Windows 11 is trying desperately to look like MacOS, which is probably the greatest bug Microsoft has ever introduced into Windows besides EternalBlue and MS08-067.
Microsoft is completely ignoring a huge market segment that chooses Windows because it's not MacOS.
Windows 7 with the Classic theme was hands-down the best Windows UI. The modern shift to flatness and hiding information/options is terrible UX. It absolutely destroys discoverability when it's not clear what elements are interactable. But it looks "clean", I guess, so somehow people prefer it.
0 replies
1h9m
The modern shift to flatness and hiding information/options is terrible UX. It absolutely destroys discoverability
Yes, but they're adding "helpful" hint dialogs that clutter the screen to compensate that loss of discoverability, so it's all good.
/s
1 replies
1d7h
The folk over at Retrocomputing Stack Exchange disagree: https://retrocomputing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1155/278
For one, it still has about half a percent desktop share (60+% in Armenia). While this may sound small, it's still a huge number of everyday users — not to mention all the appliances, kiosks and other control systems running XP.
Per Statcounter, XP makes up 0.39% of desktop Windows machines now, which is more than Windows 8. I'm not sure what to conclude from that.
0 replies
1d6h
Windows 8.1 and 10 were free upgrades from 8 with identical system requirements and similar performance on supported hardware.
Windows Vista was a paid upgrade from XP with increased system requirements and poor performance on low-end supported hardware.
1 replies
1d8h
Some would argue you may even go to 7.
This is highly subjective, but I'd consider Windows 7 as retro at this point. As of 2024, Windows 7 is 14 years old. Windows 95, for instance, was already 14 years old the year when Windows 7 was released (2009). And Windows 95 was already seen as "retro" by that time.
0 replies
1d5h
I guess it's more than Windows 7 and Windows 10/11 share a lot in common in terms of their architecture, which programs run on them etc.
I am typing this on Windows 7 and lots of programs e.g. utorrent still produce new versions which run fine on Windows 7, so I'm thinking many of the older Windows APIs are still in use and haven't changed much.
Whereas Windows 95 vs Windows 7 are very different architecturally with one being clearly superior to the other, and also Windows 95 was at the start of its series and got more mature with Windows 98 etc. and Windows 7 was already mature.
0 replies
1d7h
I know a guy who actually liked all the Metro nonsense. I'm sure he's nostalgic about Windows 8 these days. Not me though.
0 replies
1d11h
You might have ordered the CD! It was possible to order free installation disks of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and more
15 replies
1d13h
I was blown away when the Windows XP installation process required me to find a 3.5" floppy for storage drivers.
8 replies
1d12h
Because on PC, the FDC is probably the only storage component you could be sure to address at one time.
3 replies
1d3h
Back when NT 3.1 and 4.0 were mainstream, and where this storage driver on floppy process originates from, absolutely.
By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.
2 replies
10h51m
NT always installed from CDROM. The floppy loading process is because all platforms then could be relied upon to have some form of floppy from which you could install whatever custom HAL.DLL and storage driver for your specific controller that wasn't included in install media, for example any kind of HBA that was newer than your OS release.
The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.
1 replies
1h27m
Yes, I said that. Storage drivers needed to reside on floppy. I never said anything about NT not installing from CD.
I've installed NT4 god knows how many times. I'm very familiar with the process.
0 replies
1h21m
ah, it wasn't clear to me, so I just wanted to point out exactly what the floppy was supposed to pass to the system.
NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)
2 replies
1d10h
because early pc's often completely ran of floppy disks as hdd's were expensive
0 replies
1d7h
By the time XP was released no one ran their systems off floppies. A floppy was still the most common removable medium, though.
0 replies
1d7h
XP wasn't that early. IDE worked out of the box. But if you had a RAID setup or something else that needed a driver (early SATA?) you could load the driver there
0 replies
1d6h
This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone.
Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.
1 replies
1d12h
on my case, I need to install Windows 3.1 and then update to 95 and then update to 98. Windows 95 and 98 update editions
0 replies
1d8h
I remember discovering that you could do a fresh install of XP or 98SE on a blank drive from CD from the upgrade media.
At some point it would eject and ask you to put in the Windows you were upgrading from, and you could just put the same CD back in and it happily counted it.
1 replies
1d11h
Yeah, you had to slipstream in the storage drivers if you had no floppy drive.
0 replies
1d9h
slipstream
The vocabulary that people came up with in a time of Star Trek: Voyager and Fast & the Furious…
0 replies
1d6h
...not to mention the 'Aaaaarrrgh!!!!' moment I had when finding that the brand spanking new network adapter I had purchased during my student days had no floppy with drivers in the box.
Oh no. The manual stated I could simply go online to find the required drivers on the new-fangled world wide web.
Which, incidentally, was why I had bought the adapter in the first place.
0 replies
1d7h
I had a floppy drive in my PC for that sole reason since I also had a SATA disk which was a new thing at the time. Later learnt to build a custom CD and include the drivers in it, but it wasn't long then until I switched to Linux anyway.
4 replies
1d11h
I thought Windows XP's installation process looked just like Windows 2000's? Text mode display and everything, but running the Windows NT kernel.
3 replies
1d10h
It used text mode with NT for the first part, then followed up with a Win 9x and Win XP based step 2 and 3 that were themed like the Win XP login screen. Really neat tbh.
2 replies
1d7h
There's no Win 9x phase in Win XP setup, of course. :) There's optional DOS phase, then text-mode phase (running NT kernel under the hood, but UI is in VGA text mode), and then finally GUI phase of the setup.
1 replies
1d5h
You're absolutely right, I noticed my mistake only when I couldn't edit the comment anymore.
0 replies
1d2h
Still, the graphic part with progress bar on left does kinda mimic the 9x installer
1 replies
1d8h
My start of my entire interest in IT can essentially be pinpointed to receiving that red CD.
0 replies
1d3h
I was 12 and they sent a CD to me in India from the US for free! They have since discontinued the program. But meant a lot to me as a kid
0 replies
1d13h
I was blown away when I installed Ubuntu via Wubi. (It wasn't my first time installing Ubuntu, and my first time was much more traditional.)
0 replies
1d11h
I was blown away when I installed OS X from the internet directly without downloading it and copying to a usb/cd.
Next time I was blown away with installs was when I unbricked my pixel phone from Chrome!
27 replies
1d16h
Why every file name is uppercase? Is there any reason for that convention, perhaps better readability on low res display?
19 replies
1d14h
I don't get it. Even if filenames were displayed in uppercase back then, there's no reason to do so now.
It's like how people write SQL with uppercase keywords, but not any other language. I suppose it's learning by emulation and then old habits die hard.
10 replies
1d13h
Readability.
Pardon the breach of rules for a moment: IT'S EASIER TO READ THIS THAN it's easier to read this.
6 replies
1d13h
Except it's not! If it is, you need to make text much bigger. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2016788/
If readability of lower-case was the issue we would write all variable and function names in upper case, even in languages that have lower-case keywords.
4 replies
1d5h
Remember that this stuff was designed in the era when dumb terminals and early PCs had text-only displays which were incapable of showing more than one character size or one colour.
Secondly, upper-casing some parts is not about global readability; it's about contrasting code on monochrome displays.
The PARTS IN CAPITALS are the parts the language (compiler or whatever) defines and must have spelled exactly that way. The parts in lowercase are the names, symbols etc. that the programmer defines rather than the compiler or OS.
Personally that is how I learned and even now, some 40 years later, I find that C-style everything in lower case is MUCH less readable for me than mixed CAPS and minuscule.
3 replies
1d4h
I get why they did it back then (when only uppercase is available, of course you'll use uppercase). I also get why it's something people learn by imitation and then never question.
I'm just wondering what the utility is today for people who have questioned it but decided to go with uppercase for parts of the code anyway.
As someone else said, if one is prone to confusing keywords with identifiers, syntax highlighting has existed for many years now, and solves that problem MORE elegantly than INTERSPERSING a few SHOUTED words in the CODE.
2 replies
1d1h
Why should my personal preferences change just because technological trends change?
I am not a programmer, but in the last decade I worked for 2 of the biggest Linux vendors writing documentation in DocBook XML. Both companies followed the "docs as code" approach so we used programmers' editors, programmers' version control systems, etc.
I don't really want multicoloured code. I find that visually intrusive. I prefer fewer colours in my UI, not more. I find editors that indicate syntax with colour to be loud, irritating, and annoying.
I find the simple traditional look of black on white, as humans have been using for text for millennia, and capitals for keywords and minuscule for the human-written parts, easier on the eyes and brain.
I am not telling you that you should use it. I am not telling you that your preferences are wrong. I am just telling you that yours don't match mine and I prefer mine.
You seem to feel that my preferences are wrong and I am wrong and want to tell me that.
1 replies
22h41m
If your preference were applied to typography, books would look like this:
IT WAS A dark AND stormy night; THE rain fell IN torrents, except AT occasional intervals, WHEN IT WAS checked BY A violent gust OF wind WHICH swept UP THE streets (FOR IT IS IN London THAT OUR scene lies), rattling along THE house-tops, AND fiercely agitating THE scanty flame OF THE lamps that struggled AGAINST THE darkness. THROUGH one OF THE obscurest quarters OF London, AND among haunts little loved BY THE gentlemen OF THE police, A man, evidently OF THE lowest orders, WAS wending HIS solitary way. HE stopped twice OR thrice AT different shops AND houses OF A description correspondent WITH THE appearance OF THE quartier IN WHICH THEY WERE situated, AND tended inquiry FOR SOME article OR ANOTHER WHICH DID NOT seem easily TO BE met WITH.
(The verbs be and do get capitalized in all their conjugations, because they have special roles in the grammar, making them keywords.)
If typography for prose were like this, people would be used to reading it, and more code in more programming languages would look like that.
The on the other hand, people have experimented with syntax coloring for parts of speech. That actually looks quite bad and detracts from readability; yet lots of coding is done that way.
Code is laid out in certain two dimensional ways that prose is not, and the keywords that get emphasized (whether through CAPS or color or both) occur in certain predictable visual structures rather than as soup ingredients in a wall of text.
Formatting of and typography of prose are not absolutely linked.
0 replies
6h25m
No, absolutely not.
You are trying to apply your personal preferences, which are the trendy ones, as if they were absolute rules. They aren't.
(This is highly offensive, BTW.)
Also, I don't think you have read much 17-18th century literature, because people did do things similar to that... much as German still today capitalises all Nouns, English too put a capital Letter on all Nouns in the Language just a few Centuries ago.
0 replies
1d12h
The important thing is, the style needs to be consistent over the whole codebase. If most of the SQL has uppercase keywords, a small portion that does not will be harder to read.
I dislike the PEP8 style for python, but I use it anyways, mostly.
1 replies
1d13h
I've seen "lowercase is easier to read" much more often, though I lack sources either way. Intuitively it does seem that a meaningful contour on top would make mental processing easier.
Lowercase letters requiring descenders (g, j, p, q, y) might be relevant.
0 replies
1d8h
It's a bit more complicated than "X is easier to read than Y".
When we read text, we don't read letters, we read words. So familiar word shapes help reading text more quickly. Lowercase letters have more distinct shapes (due to ascenders and descenders) so they make for more distinct word shapes. Uppercase word shapes are not only less familiar (because most text you've read is not all-caps) but also less distinct because they lack descenders and all have roughly the same height.
So in other words, writing keywords as in SQL in uppercase can be more readable because a) it indicates it's that language (which can be helpful in mixed-language source code), b) the keywords usually being written in uppercase make them easier to recognize without having to be familiar with the words from other contexts (this might actually be an advantage for people who don't read as much English text) and c) this sets keywords apart from variable and attribute names without syntax highlighting.
For filenames and such there is no such advantage which is why you only occasionally see all-caps used for special files (e.g. LOCK, VERSION, README) where the uppercase text is intended to stand out from other file names and usually follows a naming convention that makes the word shape common enough to be easy to recognize.
0 replies
1d8h
There was a story some years back about some countries changing traffic signs to normal case instead of upper case because with upper case you lose the ability to pattern match words so it is actually harder to read at glance. I found a few links but I am not sure which one is the most canonical one, my memory of this is rather hazy, so I haven't linked any articles.
4 replies
1d12h
I've gone to uppercase. SQL is a noisy language, with lots of keywords cluttering up your code. I write the keywords in uppercase, and the table and column names in camel case. It seems to make the usefull stuff easyer to find, and the camel case gives a bit of extra info where it matters.
2 replies
1d4h
Oh, that does make some sense. So basically in languages like Python, Lisp and Lua you would use uppercase for identifiers like variable names to separate them from keywords and builtins, whereas in languages like Perl and C you would not, because the syntax is designed to highlight keywords through punctuation anyway?
0 replies
22h52m
Lisp is not a language, but a language family. You might be thinking of some case-sensitive member of the family.
Common Lisp is case-folding to upper case by default so DEFUN and defun are the same; both tokens denote a symbol whose name is the character string "DEFUN".
Symbol names themselves are sensitive; "DEFUN", "Defun" and "defun" are all different character strings and different symbol names. (find-symbol "defun") will not find the defun symbol.
In Common Lisp, you can carry on the sane coding convention as described by the grandparent comment, whereby built-ins like DEFUN and LET are written in upper case, and your own identifiers are mixed case.
0 replies
22h34m
Good question. I think the answer is no -- I never promised consistency ;-)
For Python, I'd follow PEP8 [1], as it is more important to follow the local programming culture, even if it has some warts. Otherwise, programs from multiple people would quickly become messy, and learning and code reuse between projects becomes harder.
I didn't do much lisp, but considered the builtins as library functions I theoretically could have written myself. So they were lower case, as coherent with all other names of functions etc...
Can't comment on Lua, I've done <100 lines of it and forgot basically all of it.
I used to write BASIC keywords in upper case and vars lowercase (GOTO longlongago)
Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs, as always. I presume SQL has not much consistency in formatting and casing, so I grew my own convention.
[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/#prescriptive-naming-conven...
0 replies
1d6h
True. This is exactly why I do it too. I wish SQL was less like English and more like a computer language.
1 replies
1d12h
It's like how people write SQL with uppercase keywords, but not any other language.
People have syntax coloring in other languages.
0 replies
1d11h
I have syntax coloring in SQL too. You should try it.
0 replies
1d4h
Fun fact: "Back then", in Windows 98, 8.3 filenames were shown in Explorer with only the first letter capitalized, and the rest in lower-case. So people were already annoyed by all the SHOUTING back then. But on NT-based systems this was no the case, so going from 98 to XP took some getting used-to in that particular case.
2 replies
1d16h
It's inherited from CP/M. That's also where the 8.3 character limits came from. Interestingly, CP/M's filesystem did support lower case characters, but CP/M's CPP would convert whatever commands you gave it to the upper case before they are executed. DOS's filesystem was case insensitive, but they otherwise followed CP/M's conventions.
0 replies
1d14h
With MS-BASIC on CP/M, if you saved the file using lowercase, BASIC would not upshift it, and the CPP commands could not act of the resulting files.
You’d have to fix it by removing the file within BASIC using the built in command (KILL I think) then saving it in uppercase.
Can’t say MS considered it a bug or simply chose to not fix it for backward compatibility. It existed in quite late versions.
0 replies
1d15h
CP/M copied DEC's operating systems, like RSX-11. They inherited the uppercase from the time when memory was expensive and 6bit ascii would fit more characters into a 36 bit word.
1 replies
1d16h
Ugh I feel old.
0 replies
1d16h
I feel your pain.
1 replies
1d16h
DOS filenames are uppercase. That came from CP/M.
In early days, computers just don't do lowercase.
When you do case-insensitivty, storing names in uppercase make sense if all older filesystem are uppercase only
0 replies
1d16h
Interestingly, CP/M's filesystem would actually do lowercase. It's just CPP would uppercase every command entered at the command line before executing it. Not surprisingly, people tended to use uppercase with CP/M.
16 replies
1d13h
What is the official name of this minimal Windows 3 system? I know it used to have a name. It was used for other purposes too, but I can't for the life of me remember what.
7 replies
1d12h
It was used when you wanted to compress the system drive (C:) with DriveSpace. it would reboot into something that looked like Windows 3.1 and do the compression. Just a single window with a progress bar and a cancel button, but the button and the title bar gave it away. I'm assuming it was loaded entirely into ram so it could safely meddle with the system partition. I always wondered if there was a way to boot into a working 3.1 environment as that stuff had to live somewhere in your install.
5 replies
1d11h
I remember until win98, you could run a program called fileman or something that looked like a win3.1 file browser. That was my idea of retro back then..
4 replies
1d11h
Ask and ye shall receive: https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile
File Manager, or winfile.exe, was the predecessor to Explorer's file management aspects. You can use it on Windows 10 and 11 (and all the others) if you want to.
Program Manager, or progman.exe, was the predecessor shell to Explorer. It was included with Windows through Windows XP SP1 before finally being stubbed in SP2 and removed altogether in Vista. You can probably grab the binary from XP SP1 and run it in newer Windows versions, though.
3 replies
1d9h
Might have to see if it works on wine. The screenshot has the horrible aero window frame though.
2 replies
1d8h
It's a multiple documents interface program (where one main window contains subwindows), a UI style out of fashion since the early days of Windows 95 (IIRC it was Office 97 that switched Office apps from MDI to multiple main windows for example). For some reason Microsoft hasn't updated the theming for them since Windows Vista, probably because it's such a niche thing. Even on Vista / 7, they're stuck as Aero Basic windows, rather than the actually glass ones. The Windows Forms editor in Visual Studio also using those window borders, which shows how much MS cares about that compared to XAML dialect of the week.
The Aero Basic theme is particularly horrible though, I do wonder if that particularly unpleasant shade of cyan for the borders was picked to punish those who didn't activate Windows, or were to poor to afford Home Premium.
In the end it's one of those weird forgotten things, like the Windows 3.x colour picker dialogue that still lurks in a few places like Wordpad (although MS are "solving" that).
1 replies
1d8h
So I think the WinForms editor thing occurs because of how windows are drawn rather than something related to Visual Studio itself. (You could see this more easily on Windows XP or whatever where if you decided to change from Luna to Olive or what have you, the WinForms designer form would change as well.)
I think it's probably an artifact of drawing the window in a particular way using the Win32 API.
For example, you can also see the "Aero Basic" style if you do a Control.DrawToBitmap on a Form control. (According to the winforms source, `DrawToBitmap` just sends a WM_PRINT message.)
I am actually mildly surprised it didn't change in Windows 10, but maybe that part of the codebase never got updated. Who knows :)
(Side note: there's also this article[1] from 2004 that describes creating your own custom "designer" type application. It's pretty old, but it might be interesting nontheless.)
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2004...
0 replies
1d3h
Supporting your point: if you set Form.TopLevel to false and then add the form as a control to another form, it'll be drawn in the "Aero Basic" style there, too.
0 replies
20h20m
There's an INI file that contained a line like "SHELL=explorer.exe", if you changed that to "SHELL=progman.exe" it would boot up looking like Windows 3.1, and it worked at least as late as Win98. I had to use it once when something with Explorer got corrupted.
2 replies
1d11h
Seems to be "Mini.cab"? Don't know if there are any other names for it.
1 replies
1d6h
There was a sort of PE called MiniNT I think that was a dos like Windows NT but I don't recall if it was used for any setup of Windows as it's been a few decades. Ouch that hurt to write.
0 replies
1d
Is that like the recovery console of Windows 2000/XP? Not Windows PE GUI with a command prompt window, but a fullscreen text-mode environment.
1 replies
1d12h
Pretty sure you have Windows Preinstallation Environment, WinPE in mind but it arrived with XP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...
On Windows 200 and XP you could install additional recovery console - which in later version has become a default addition to the system
0 replies
1d3h
Ah, this was what I was thinking of, thank you. WinPE.
1 replies
1d12h
Are you thinking of the Windows 3.00 Working Model?
0 replies
1d3h
I'd not seen that one before, but I could have done with that version on my twin floppy 286 as it was a pain to run 3.1 on it.
0 replies
1d9h
BetaWiki claims it's based on Modular Windows[1], as also used on the infamous Tandy VIS. Haven't a clue if it's true, and Modular Windows was used for basically nothing, MS seemed to just give up and move onto embedded version of NT fairly quickly.
10 replies
1d16h
There's a whole list of weird Windows UI remnants from previous versions on github:
4 replies
1d12h
That's an interesting list that shows today's understanding of the word "modern".
"Modern" today means "recently changed". Not better, not less bugs, just that it's recently changed. It can even have more bugs, but it still will be "modern", and people will be OK with that, because since it's recently changed, it has to have bugs, right?
Examples:
- "in some programs, double-clicking program icon on top-left window will close the program. it's a same actions as Win3.1 even Win1.0, where the close button is placed on top-left window until Win95." quote Rizki Fauzan (not counting this as a Windows 1.0 remnant because it was still useful in 3.1)
Why is it a problem? Why removing this feature is desirable? I often doubleclick the icon to close the window (because my Linux desktop has X in the top left corner instead of top right). Why it's desirable to not have this feature?
- pifmgr.dll and moricons.dll (ancient icon libraries) - left since Windows 3.1
Those icons are often superior to their "modern" counterparts, even though they’re not vector graphics. Why would anyone want to remove them?
- ODBC Data Sources - unchanged since Windows 3.1
I wonder if the author even knows what ODBC is?
Some of the entries are also wrong (msconfig has been updated since Win98).
This list in the center of why I am depressed by today's software design.
3 replies
1d11h
"Modern" today means "recently changed". Not better, not less bugs, just that it's recently changed.
That's what modern always means. Sometimes modern is good, sometimes it's bad; this applies to art, technology, cuisine, lifestyles, etc. Although on windows 'Modern UI' was a keyword refering specifically to the Tiles UI and everything that went with it. I think Microsoft has tried to forget that. If the term sticks, 'Modern UI' will become the same sort of term as 'Art Nouveau' that means New Art in theory, but means art in a style that was defined around 1880-1910.
1 replies
1d8h
I've always interpreted it as "improved". That's probably the reason for my disappointment, which highlights a disparity between my expectations and the real state of the world. Yet another reason to abandon hope I guess.
0 replies
1d5h
Nah.
Some bits of the 20th century were about improvement.
The 21st has been about spiralling growth and consumption and everything getting worse than before, although sometimes it's briefly shiny.
In software, in hardware, in human life on the planet Earth.
Once you accept this, things make more sense and it's easier to relate to people born into this world and their jaded detachment.
20th century "modern" -- better, improved, refined.
21st century "modern" -- given a coat of paint, looks shiny, but underneath it's the same old junk, just worn out and creaking and failing, but rebranded and sold as NEW.
0 replies
18h30m
Although on windows 'Modern UI' was a keyword refering specifically to the Tiles UI and everything that went with it.
I have been stubbornly calling this "Metro" since it first came out. Sure, Microsoft may have deprecated the terminology 12 years ago, but I don't care, and neither does Wikipedia.
2 replies
1d16h
...also known as "the good parts".
0 replies
1d16h
right? they can pry right-click-on-titlebar-to-move from my cold, dead hands
0 replies
1d16h
Yup. There's 'The useless modern settings panels' and 'The Win7 holdover control panels I can drill down into, and actually make useful configuration changes in'
1 replies
1d15h
The fact that there are still remnants that go all the way back to Windows 1.0 is baffling. It's crazy how lazy Microsoft has gotten when it comes to updating these features. It seems like the older they get, the less likely Microsoft is to actually update them.
I don't get it. Why being so overly critical? Why should they update the ODBC.exe or dxdiag.exe, or even regedit.exe? They serve their purpose and work just fine.
0 replies
1d14h
Raymond Chen mentioned that some programs peek into the internals of old dialogs (a sort of automation) and so they left a lot of old stuff intact to avoid breaking such programs.
7 replies
1d12h
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Chenmunka May 26, 2020 at 16:59
chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/... : Page not found
This is really wrong. I wanted to read that discussion.
5 replies
1d12h
Here you go: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/108509/2020/5/26
For some reason, you'll need to be logged into Stack Exchange to view that.
Screen-grab: https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aalu.jpg
4 replies
1d11h
I'm logged in and the link doesn't work.
So, thanks for the screengrab! I'm always a bit annoyed by people cleaning comments like this to move it to chat when stack exchange chat is so bad and somehow always has messed up timestamps.
2 replies
1d6h
You probably need the amount of reputation needed to view deleted posts and answers/comments. (last i've checked it was 10k)
1 replies
1d5h
My rep is in the hundreds and I can't see it.
0 replies
1d4h
Only diamond moderators can see deleted comments. You need 10K reputation to view deleted posts, so you have a long way to go if you are only in the hundreds.
0 replies
21h22m
Equally annoying to finding a search result on some forum and it's full of people complaining to use the search function instead of posting a new thread, but the thread I clicked on is by far the most popular and informative
0 replies
1d1h
I've undeleted the room, so it'll be viewable until the deletion script next runs. (At any time, feel free to raise a flag on Stack Exchange, and a moderator will undelete the chat room for you.) There's not a way to stop Stack Exchange chat automatically deleting rooms, other than filling the rooms with enough dummy messages. It's a longstanding feature request: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/288612/308065.
6 replies
1d16h
I used to only own 'upgrade' versions of Windows (cheaper).
Whenever I had to reinstall Windows (which was frequent back in Win98 days), I had to first install DOS from floppy, then Win 3.11 from floppy, then a CD-ROM driver, then Win95 from CD until I could finally install Win98. (at one point I acquired a non-upgrade version of Win95 but it came on 20+ floppies, so the installation was not really much faster).
The end-result was a Win98 installation with a lot of old software lying around as the 'upgrade' installers did not always remove all of the existing items.
4 replies
1d8h
I know, it's probably a bit late now, but you can clean install from the upgrade media. The setup program merely asks you to insert the installation floppy or CD into the computer to verify that you actually own an older qualifying operating system.
To clean-install Windows 98 using the Upgrade version, it would accept either 3.1x or 95 installation media. After the verification, it'll proceed to work exactly like the fully-purchased product version, no cruft from an older OS (since the older OS was never installed in the first place).
I know they continued doing this at least up until Windows Vista and 7. Helpful especially since Windows 2000 was a qualifying operating system for Vista upgrade, but a direct upgrade wasn't possible from 2000; it could directly upgrade from XP, though. Windows 7 would restrict the qualifying OSes to XP and Vista, and only allow direct upgrades from Vista. (Never tried newer versions of Windows, can't say what 8/10/11 do, but I have little reason to believe the practice has changed.)
2 replies
1d7h
At least until XP or so you could just put the same disk back in. Upgrading from 98 SE to 98 SE? Sounds good!
1 replies
1d7h
Vista didn't quite allow that, but it did have a dumb workaround: you could still install Vista, but it wouldn't activate until you proved that you owned an older product.
Well, from the unactivated Vista, you can run Vista setup, and "upgrade" on top of itself. That was enough for the OS to flag itself as being an upgraded install, and you could activate from that point.
0 replies
1d5h
It was that along with the original lasting so long that made me realize that Microsoft didn't care much about customers pirating, they didn't want manufacturers pirating.
0 replies
15h47m
That does ring a bell but I don't _think_ Win98 accepted Win3.11 floppies as valid media (or at least did not accept mine, which I am not sure were 'originals') and my Win95 disc was also an upgrade version.
I do remember playing similar shenanigans just a couple of years ago when I bought a laptop without Windows and I did not know that the Windows licence that came with my old laptop was bound to that machine...
I had a random Windows 8 key lying around and through a bit of wrestling (which I should have probably documented...) I was able to use that to install a new copy of Win10 on my laptop (which should be upgradable to Win11).
0 replies
1d15h
My main desktop had the same installation of Windows for 15 years, from Vista in 2007 right the way through to 10 in 2023, having upgraded through every intermediate version. I only finally did a fresh reinstall for 11.
I would copy the hard drive contents from one drive to the next each time I bought a new drive, and ultimately that installation survived three complete hardware refreshes and countless interim component upgrades.
Needless to say, there was a LOT of cruft hanging about by the end. From ancient components from old versions of Visual Studio to drivers for early 2000s era scanners. Most of it still ran too, testament to Microsoft’s backwards compatibility.
5 replies
1d7h
I am so tired of clicking through cookie acknowledgements on every freakin StackExchange subdomain. Somebody please make it stop.
2 replies
1d7h
U-block origin with the annoyances filters switched on?
I live in the EU and only about 1/10 sites have a banner that show up for me.
1 replies
1d7h
Consent-o-matic is great for the sites which still show banners despite filtering. I even have it installed on firefox for android, where it's more useful .
0 replies
1d2h
And it officially registers your opt-out, if you care about that sort of thing.
0 replies
1d2h
Welcome back! If you found this question useful, don't forget to vote both the question and the answers up.
Cookie notices are at least easy to get rid of, there exist various adblocker filter lists specifically for that. That popup though...
0 replies
1d5h
Installing ad & annoyance blockers is good. Another approach is to nuke "sticky" elements with a simple bookmarklet. It also removes a bunch of other useless crap from modern websites, like those lame floating headers & footers. I wrote about it here: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
5 replies
1d16h
New Old Thing goes in-depth about the windows under windows.
3 replies
1d15h
Very underrated blog and an even more underrated book.
2 replies
1d10h
He wrote a book?
0 replies
1d10h
0 replies
1d10h
He sure did. It's a mixture of stories (some of which are on his blog, some not) and fairly detailed example programs highlighting various parts of Windows.
0 replies
1d1h
Do you have any recommendations?
I assume this is the one you’re talking about https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
I was curious, went to the end (page 699!) and it’s pretty interesting. But obviously it’s hard to find the important ones.
4 replies
1d15h
Windows Millennium Edition was much flashier, although I particularly liked the blue background and white text.
2 replies
1d9h
I was trying to hold ME back for as long as possible, and I managed to almost skip it. It was only hiding DOS (but still based on DOS) and not introducing much of a performance improvements (if any, maybe only on boot). Meanwhile I played a lot of DOS games (still) that were unplayable from windows (like Pinball Fantasies)
1 replies
1d6h
Windows Me wasn't so bad on the right (read: supported) since it's some freak between Windows NT and dos. Really interesting the history of the NT and Win9x teams kind of stealing code for UX and drivers back and forth
0 replies
1d4h
Would love to hear more.
I remember ME looking so shiny, but in the end had some childhood age problems
0 replies
1d7h
Windows ME had the best boot floppy. I kept it around until 2007 or so, until booting from USB sticks became reliable enough and reinstalling Windows was no longer strongly recommended every time you upgraded your system.
4 replies
1d17h
The Windows 11 installer is basically Windows 7 for the first part too, though this might be changing soon.
2 replies
1d17h
I'm not sure about 2K and before, but starting with XP all of the NT-based Windows use some version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro... for their installer.
0 replies
1d17h
Windows 2000, 2003, and XP still used a lot of the install components from earlier NT versions. Vista was the first incarnation of the "modern" Windows setup that we still use today.
PE was built using XP but the XP installer was mostly the NT installer (text mode then Mini-Windows).
0 replies
1d17h
As mentioned already by a sibling commenter, installers for NT4 through XP/2003 were all based off earlier NT installers with text mode and all.
WinPE has its roots in NT5.1 (XP), but it was from NT6.0 (Vista) that we got the "modern" installer, and it last saw a UI overhaul during NT6.1 (7). Throughout 8 through 11 so far, the first part of the installer was and is basically Windows 7.
The screenshot[1] of WinPE 10.0 on that Wikipedia article showcases the Windows Basic[2] theme in all its glory, including even the Windows 7 and prior Task Manager.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_PE_screenshot.png
0 replies
1d11h
It's just little changed in theme/resource files, it boots straight to windows 11 for installer.
Before Vista, the installer process on NT had three phases:
1. Optional DOS phase to bring minimal NTLDR environment up
2. "Micro" NT without Win32 API that ran only NTAPI (NE format executables et al) applications in the minimal console support (with the characteristic default of white on blue). This would do equivalent of "minimal install" on unices to the target disk, setting up proper HAL.DLL, boot time drivers, and setting up registry hives.
3. GUI installer that booted from hard disk with Win32 subsystem enabled.
3 replies
1d12h
I was somehow able to change my mouse processing animation to red running horse.
That was the highlight of my year and I showed it to all my schoolmates.
1 replies
1d11h
I am pretty sure this is possible on Arch Linux, too!
0 replies
1d8h
You run Arch BTW.
0 replies
1d11h
You probably still can. In Win10 there is still control panel / mouse / cursors / browse button.
1 replies
1d14h
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
0 replies
1d4h
Yes — we do the same thing!
0 replies
15h11m
SE/SO has been a tire fire since 2014.
0 replies
1d17h
Interesting! Makes a lot of sense, too: if you’re offering the ability to upgrade from 3.1 you’re going to need to support it anyway, so why not use it as a setup bootstrap?
I remember preferring Windows 2000 but can’t remember exactly why. Very similar to 98 but felt more refined somehow.
NT kernel with it's related stability, true-color interface, no XP "fisher price" UI. 2000 was probably the pinnacle of that era's design language. Ironically, XP made it more feasible to use 2000 day to day as drivers for XP worked on the earlier 2000.
Re: XP UI — did you ever try Windows Server 2003?
Server 2003 was my daily driver on a laptop for a few years. Most XP software ran fine but it had none of the XP visual cruft. Until Windows 7 it was peak Windows for me.
I ran that rare beast, Windows XP64. It was basically Server2003 x64 with the XP UI.
Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux.
That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.
I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.
XP64 was an odd animal.
I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain.
I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.
IIRC you could actually run XP themes on 2k3 if you started the theme service. Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel (I think server / 5.2 had a slightly different IP stack and some server tweaks for task scheduling, shadow volumes and memory caching).
Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.
Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :)
But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance.
It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)
XP "fisher price" UI was trivial to disable in settings, giving you that same slate gray look of 98/2K, but with 24-bit color icons.
This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).
I know this sounds petty but the XP’s Classic’s task bar gray was ever slightly off from Windows 2000 and it drove me nuts. I think Windows 2000 was visually the best.
Once you were back to the 9x/2k style chrome, I'm fairly sure you also had access to the older style of color/size customization for it as well. On a minor tangent, I miss how well the high contrast theme used to display on windows itself and the majority of applications that were still made within that standard toolkit, using it now seems to lack polish and most applications are doing their own thing within their window.
It was slightly warmer than 2K (which itself was noticeably warmer than 98).
However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.
While you could disable the fisher price theme in XP (and Vista and 7), even in classic theme you still had the "plastic" icons.
Yup, but this was all customizable. In fact it even included the old icons in the box - they were used if you ever set it to use 8-bit color mode - so you just needed to point the shell at the right DLLs in the registry (for which there were third-party utilities).
It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.
I always thought that the Windows XP color theme was vastly over hated. I thought it looked nice, but even if one didn't enjoy it, I cannot understand why people acted like it killed their dog.
It was grating. If XP had worked on release as well as it did three years later there would have been little complaining.
But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.
I hated the blue and red default but was fine with the two other alternatives.
Windows 2000 was based on NT. While it had the Windows 98 interface it was very different underneath. It's a bit bonkers, but MS sold two superficially-identical operating systems for five plus years, that were in reality, about as different as two OSes could be; different histories, different underlying architecture, little code shared between the kernels and only part of the userland. And yet the two OS families had almost exactly the same UI and API.
it made sense at the time, pcs had limited ram and win98 ran much better.
With a decent amount of RAM, though, 2000 was far more stable.
I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry.
How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s.
So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today.
There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12...
[2]: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239
For old computers maybe. I never actually heard of anyone doing an upgrade-install of Windows though.
I had 64MB in ... probably 1998 and we weren't even a computer-focused household. And your second link seems to back that up ("early 1999"), and that was a major improvement that basically obsoleted our old '95 computer but managed to last until well into the XP era ... huh, which is actually only the same 3 years apart, though we got SP1 which was a year after that.
It's kind of weird how Microsoft released a different OS each year for 4 years in a row.
You should read the whole thread, then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39986341
Some users had to install DOS, then Win3, then Win9x, just to get to (say) Win98SE.
It was a thing.
IBM sold an entire edition of OS/2 Warp that required you to already have Windows 3.1 installed in order to use Windows compatibility. It was called the "Red Spine" edition:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-warp/
98 to XP was 3 years.
98 to 98 SE to 2000 to XP and back to 2000 was all in A short time.
I do understand. I was there. My personal PCs from that time had 16MB (a getting old AMD 5x86 133) and 32MB (Celeron 300A w/ the 450Mhz "mod"), and I ran Linux and Windows 95/98 on them. I didn't get W2K at home until late 2001 and that was only because I splurged.
Windows 2000 was a ridiculous luxury item for home users at the time, but for business PCs it was a real winner. It was so much more stable than Windows 95/98. The "we build PCs" shop I worked at did a good job of convincing business Customers to spend the extra money for stability. Only a minority bit on the idea, but people definitely talked about seeing fewer reboots and better multitasking w/ the W2K machines. It helped sell itself.
(We also did least-privilege user accounts all the way back in the NT 4.0 days. "Cleaning up" the malware of the day was so easy because, by and large, you could just blow away the user's profile and start with a fresh registry. Since the user didn't have Administrator rights making machine-wide changes was "off limits" for most malware of the time.)
IIRC one of 2000s main design advantages is that when a installer tried to crap various dlls into the windows directory it redirected them back to their own install and only used them for that program. This basically solved the dll hell problem that tended to rot 9x installs after 6 months.
I was a cheap ass but I remember ponying up for extra ram and switching to 2000 quite early which is something I never do these days.
Indeed. When Microsoft called them Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Windows 2000 Professional, they damn well meant it.
You said "decent amount of RAM" in a very nonchalant fashion, so I felt that maybe a reorienting of the focal lens was necessary. RAM today is so mundane everyone wastes it without a care in the world[1], but it wasn't always this way.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920226
I ran Win95 in 1995 for a few months on 4MB of RAM.
Indeed. I remember running Windows 95 on a 32MB machine and stayed on Windows 95 even after 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 were released simply because that's what worked well on the machines I had at the time. IRRC I had a P166MMX with 32MB of RAM from 1997 which remained my main machine for some years. Win95 only needed the correct drivers for the newer post-1995 hardware. I ended up skipping 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and going straight to XP for my next upgrade at some point in the early 2000's as I had acquired a new machine which couldn't run Windows 95 without a whole lot of patches and Firefox eventually dropped support for Windows 95. By then the hardware I had was good enough that XP worked fine.
2000 is what you ran if you were hosting your lan party. 98 is what you had if you were invited to your friends lan party.
Driver support was also terrible for a long time.
It was an interesting time. Until NT4.0, NT supported intel, Power PC, Alpha and MIPS architectures. And until Windows 2000, NT could run OS/2 apps.
Win 2000 is the first MS Windows that did not crash very often. I used it as my primary desktop OS for as long as I could until I switched to XP. The best Windows IMHO.
It was, but before it, NT 3.51 was both very fast and very stable... if you could tolerate the Program Manager/File Manager UI.
NT 4 reorganised the kernel and that badly impacted stability. Win2K fixed that.
I didn't get the chance to use NT 3/4 but maybe that's for another day!
I still remember the day my father installed Windows 3.1, pure magic. I have never used any GUI OS before that (that was DOS and then we went straight for Win 3.1).
I did set up one NT4 box in the 21st century.
I was building a PC for a broke mate of mine, and all I had to spare was about 40MB of RAM. The choice was either Windows ME, which didn't run great in that little, or NT4, for which it was quite generous.
NT4 looked like Win95 and it was quite solid. No power management, no USB support, not FAT32, but it didn't crash. WinME did all them but was not very stable.
NT changed significantly over its lifetime. I deployed and supported all versions in production.
NT 3.1: first release. Big, slow, no long filenames on FAT, needed a crazy 32MB of RAM in 1993, meaning a £5000+ PC. But very solid, and great networking.
NT 3.5: LFNs on FAT. Bit smaller and faster and more stable.
NT 3.51: a classic release. Smaller and faster still. I ran my home fileserver on NT 3.51 for years, in 8MB of RAM. Slow on the console, fine over a 10Mb/sec LAN. Absolutely rock solid, very quick.
NT 4: finally you get Explorer and the Win95 desktop, but bigger, slower, less stable. No plug'n'play, only very rudimentary power management, little to no useful 3D support. Not much use on laptops. But looked as good as Win95/98 and was as easy to use.
NT 5, AKA "Windows 2000": finally, full power management, full PnP, hotplug, USB, FAT32. All the good stuff that NT4 couldn't do. Bigger, slower, but very solid and worked well.
NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": Win2K plus themes, some bundled junk you can't uninstall like Movie Maker. Boots faster, much quicker hibernation/resume... and that is all. Bigger, slower, looks cheap and plastic.
I preferred W2K.
First (and so far last) OS I bought with my own money. Well, as a separate purchase -- have bought a couple of laptops since then. So probably the last OS I'll ever pay for as a purchase of its own.
There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box in the Control Panel that made it look like W95 / NT4 / W2K. Check, problem fixed. That hung around in Vista / W7 too.
I preferred W7 -- the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?), because after a while they started disabling some of the above-mentioned stuff in the Control Panel. And towards the end not even doing those changes directly in the Registry kept its effect after a reboot. :-(
OS/2 2.0 for me.
Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.
But it was extra work, and most people didn't do it.
In a world where people curate collections of classic icons, e.g.
https://alexmeub.com/projects/windows-98-icons/
... and discuss looks and themes, and GNOME >=40 tries to disable theming, I think it's relevant and legitimate to point the finger at the point the rot set in to the extent that Windows itself adopted themes as standard. As well as them not being very good themes.
(Come back NeXTstep, all is forgiven. NeXT was right: greyscale is adequate for classic beauty.)
A different thing, I think.
XP is what drove me off Windows. (I should be grateful for that.) But I tried it last year and to my shock I liked it:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...
Since Vista, the resource footprint of Windows hasn't changed massively. Win7 is Vista point one. Win8 is Vista point two, which makes 7.1 either Vista point 2.1 or point 3.
10 is a bit bigger but it's really 8.1 cleaned up. Call it NT 6.4 or 6.5.
I haven't dug deep into 11 -- I detest it -- but it's only a .1 really.
No idea what this means.
Win7 never even got to SP2.
I agree. I still feel deeply nostalgic for Windows 2000. Everything was instant. And almost every program did more than what Slack does today and yet Slack is sluggishly slow. We went wrong somewhere.
100%. And the UI is intuitive. If it looks like a button, it is. The scrollbar doesn't disappear randomly and actually is wide enough to grab easily.
Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.
Flat design was welcomed by a lot of designers as it required far lesser skill compared to designers before the flat era. As a result it spread rapidly.
Thanks for the explanation, but why? Is drawing a proper button that hard comparing to a rectangle?
This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…)
And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.)
To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.
IIRC, Windows 2000 had an overall bluer theme that reduced the green background and orange-tinged 3D colors of 98, and brought in a new set of icons. Also, it added alpha blending to GDI and started using it in Explorer.
It also used a lighter base gray than 95/98 did, which contributed to it feeling significantly less dreary. This is why for me, the canonical “classic Windows” theme is the 2k version.
The base color also had an off-white beige tone to it. To this day I'm curious if this was made as an attempt to counter balance the usual white balance of pc monitors at the time, which where set at or above 9300K, producing a blue-ish tint.
When win2000 was still in testing (was this called Memphis, can't remember) the UI elements like the X to close the window would light up in blue. Never made it to release.
USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me...
The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...
In general I’m a fan of the aesthetic of Win2K’s icons. Strikes a nice middleground between old and new, and as you’ve described it’s just satisfying somehow.
I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it.
It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB.
It ran all games and applications that I tried to run.
I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility.
It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.
I remember editing driver INI files to get newer video cards to install on 2000. They’d ship with XP drivers but you just needed to modify the INI to let them show up and work in 2K.
For me it was the top window gradient. I think in win98 it was 256 colors and in windows 2000 it was 16-bit
I absolutely love the Isys Information Architects Inc. pages on UI, especially the Hall of Shame/Fame. They're a bit of a time capsule, but it honestly makes me think that it's not just pointless cynicism, UI design really has very long ago lost track of what matters. I can relate to a vast majority of the thoughts, even if I think we could do better now, if we tried.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm
I feel like the style of the UI, though dated, helps a lot: the borders and hierarchy force you to think about how UI components are related, not just where they are on screen. Unlike, e.g. modern Firefox tabs, which just feel like weird floating text with arbitrary ugly borders that never seem to feel less alien no matter how long you use them. They're not literally unusable... but they're not particularly good, especially compared to what we had before.
This gives me hope for projects like SerenityOS. A bit of oldschool UI design with some modern amenities. In theory, this seems like a good idea.
The UIs of the 80s and 90s were designed to be learned, and carefully refined through focus testing. These UIs used consistent visual affordances, and contained contextual help. Constraints on memory, resolution, and color depth discouraged the inclusion of visual elements that did not contribute directly to usability and functionality.
The UIs of today are largely designed by people who have experienced GUIs for their entire lives, and assume that everyone is already familiar with conventions. Focus testing is seen as slow and expensive, so designers lean on A/B testing and telemetry, randomly breaking live user experiences in small batches to creep toward local maxima. Needing a help system is viewed as old-fashioned; users should paw at UIs like a puzzle box to discover features. Computers and displays are powerful enough for every application to be a unique "branded experience".
There's a good paper here on the (95) UI team's design goals and how they were achieved: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Also https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611 (doi:10.1145/238386.238611).
Our A/B testing shows that making the "Next Page" button on our app tiny and virtually the same colour as the background has massively increased user engagement! Just look at how much more time users spend on each page, scrolling up and down like they're really studying the content.
Leopard introduced the pop-over and HUD elements in 2007, and I think this was the last of intuitive UI that I’ve encountered.
e.g. Spotify
There have always been ui stinkers, but the early days of GUIs had companies spending large amounts of money treating usability as the major output of a serious engineering effort. Now, for all the talk about usability, the actual focus for most companies is on keeping up with the art movement de jour or with maximizing engagement or a similar metric that's only loosely related to usability.
Usability and engagement are usually inversely correlated. The more usable the software, the less time I need in it to perform my task.
And it's scary how often the developers themselves (in the widest sense of the word) don't realise this! They've picked targets and chase them without stopping to think that many applications are a means to an end, not an end itself.
But it is a difficult balance. One has to define metrics that tell apart "user doesn't incorporate solution in their workflow" (bad) and "user completes their work using solution quickly" (good).
I somewhat agree… but the force of nostalgia surely is slightly biasing, don’t you think?
Little of column a, little of column b. Yes, nostalgia is a factor, BUT:
- The lack of overhead required by security and 'features' like querying an internet search when you click the start menu or showing advertising in the calculator or better memory management in general, meant that overall UI response in that era used to be much _MUCH_ faster than it is today. Once upon a time you could operate your O/S with the speed of a Starcraft tournament winner; this simply is not possible any more.
- You could 'queue' commands - clicking the close button on an program and then (before it had finished closing) clicking the minimise button would minimise the program behind it immediately after the closing process finished. In this way you could chain/queue commands rather than being forced to wait for the OS to update between each step.
- Enter and Spacebar did different things. If a prompt had two buttons, one would be outlined with a thick black line that would respond to [Enter], and one would be outlined in a dotted line that would respond to [spacebar]. This is still the case sometimes but is far from ubiquitous.
- The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click. Though still used by some MS programs today like Explorer, its usefulness is lessened if not all programs utilise it.
- Don't even get me started on keyboard shortcuts.
These kinds of universally-accepted and _useful_ power-user-oriented design principles are almost absent from UX as it is implemented today.
I don't remember almost ever using the top left "system" menu after Windows 3.x. Windows 9x (and NT starting from 4.0) had dedicated buttons for maximizing, minimizing and closing windows with a single click. Moving and resizing could be done by grabbing the title bar or corners, as they can today.
I don't remember exactly how the resizing and moving as found in the menu worked. Maybe they allowed for resizing/moving without aiming at the relatively small corners or the title screen. But for that I much prefer the traditional Unix style of alt + click/drag anywhere on a window moving the window. Alt + right mouse button similarly resizes it.
That is a feature I have missed on Windows.
I do seem to remember sometimes using a series a key presses to minimize the window through the system menu without using the mouse. But that was also due to not having an actual keyboard shortcut for doing that.
Alt-space, N to minimise the window.
The system window was handy for retrieving windows that had somehow ended up offscreen. Alt-space, M for move, hit an arrow key once, and then the window follows your cursor and ends up on screen by default. Still works in modern versions of Windows - it's somewhat obsolete now you can use Win+arrow keys to move a window around, but it might still be useful if your window has ended up somewhere and you can't figure out where.
Imperfect graphics drivers and an environment that changes screens and resolutions a lot means that once every few months some fucking application is going to wander off where I can't get to it, and no amount of Windows+directionkey will move it somewhere usable.
Sometimes the Old Magics are still required.
Pretty sure that's already a standard across all Windows version, plus Xfce and KDE have similar menus and the double-click to close feature
They do... but KDE doesn't support the standard keystrokes, so it destroys my muscle-memory.
Xfce works with most of them.
Windows 98 was from a time where the assumption a user was familiar with the computer wasn't made. We've since lost that assumption, and a lot with it.
Well, I wouldn't pick the RC Cola of UIs. I'd pick the original.
In this instance are you stanning Windows 1 (lol), MacOS 1, Lisa, the Xerox Alto, or NLS?
Yes
As long as you also choose the Moon Pie of UIs to go with it, you’ll be fine.
For Windows, I probably agree too. Like others here though I had a soft spot for Windows 2000, everything felt slightly more refined in win2k.
Personally I'd probably take some version of Mac OS 8/9 as peak mouse driven GUI design. The third party app ecosystem in Mac OS was a lot better about respecting UI conventions on the platform IMHO, Windows app UIs were all over the place for me during this period as they transitioned out of the DOS era.
Simple things, like how installing apps was just dragging them to a folder, not the plethora of setup.exe examples found on Windows, were pretty nice back then on the Mac UI.
There are of course lots of things that sucked about old Mac OS then - memory management etc - but the UI design was great.
I really like all the UI changes introduced in 2000. Especially the color palette: that subtle change from strong gray in 9x to lighter one worked pretty well. With all the gradients on icons, preview pane in Explorer, Tahoma as default UI font and introduction of transparency/fade elements I forget 98 SE quickly. And of course there was the stability of the NT - back then the price was lack of compatibility with games.
Windows 2000 introduced layered windows (mouse pointer has a drop shadow!), transparency effects, and other features into the Shell [0]. In my opinion, having used Windows since 3.0, 2000 is my favorite in terms of icons, shell, etc.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507...
SerenityOS replicates that look and feel. It is also implemented in a dialect of C++ that adheres to some of the good parts of C++98: https://serenityos.org
I used to think along similar lines, until three weeks ago when I tried KDE for the first time.
I don't know why it took me so long to try it. KDE is an excellent steward of this style of user interface.
Except the search in application launcher uses the Windows 10 method of showing random results in random order with added bonus of results rearranging after you stop typing.
Yesss. Gnome also does this with its file manager. Worst design ever. Second to only S0 sleep. I use Pcmanfm in all my gnome installations to have sane file navigation.
I agree with your criticism. However, the overarching design of KDE makes it reasonable because of configurability. There's an option for "always sort applications alphabetically", and the entire widget itself could be replaced with a different one. In fact there is even a concept of "alternative widgets" for this with two other options. I don't see something that matches your requirements that already exists but it seems like something that would be in scope for the project.
Also this is on version 5 but they had a major release of 6 recently, and I don't know whether those changes included anything to this widget.
Imagine a world where you know exactly where on the title bar you can click to drag a window around and where you can't. A world where you can tell how long pages are by glancing at the scroll bar. A world where you can tell what windows you have open because your taskbar icons are labeled. Enter the world of...Windows 98!
I never wanted a heart icon response on HN until now.
Except, it all went downhill with Active Desktop.
Windows 95 had a better UI. Windows 98 was the beginning of Microsoft trying to Webify everything to cram Internet Explorer down everyone's throats. It had non-monopoly-related dangers; by making the difference between the desktop and web more ambiguous, it erased the "local things=relatively safe, network things=relatively risky" heuristic we internalized at the time. Not exactly 100% true in an era of Word macro viruses, but it was useful.
I would nominate late AmigaOS or BeOS as having a better WIMP UI than any Windows.