<story><title>Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002</title><url>https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mangecoeur</author><text>&amp;gt; clean and neat&lt;p&gt;Really? You miss that special &amp;quot;concrete gray and primary blue&amp;quot; feel?&lt;p&gt;I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the &amp;quot;historic&amp;quot; interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the &amp;quot;classic&amp;quot; theme on modern windows boxes (&amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s faster!&amp;quot; - no, it isn&amp;#x27;t to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to stare at beige rectangles all day).&lt;p&gt;I think engineers have a lot of nostalgia for this old stuff, but it&amp;#x27;s misplaced - interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes. We&amp;#x27;ve given up excessive skeumorphism, but we&amp;#x27;ve kept improvements in design, layout, graphics, and perhaps most importantly we&amp;#x27;ve learned that you need someone with serious visual and UX design skills to make an interface.</text></item><item><author>72deluxe</author><text>I really liked these.&lt;p&gt;This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware.&lt;p&gt;After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 because my machine wasn&amp;#x27;t powerful enough to run Windows 95... How a second-hand 486DX was a revelation. 16MB of RAM! Unfathomable! What could use so MUCH RAM????&lt;p&gt;I also remember faffing with config.sys etc. to unload mouse drivers so I could run games that moaned about himem.sys in DOS. And telling every game that I really did have an Adlib sound card and a SoundBlaster 16. I really didn&amp;#x27;t. It was a £7.50 soundcard I bought from a boy at school (who now works at Amazon and has software patents, well done to him! He was really clever, wrote games, played piano like a pro too. Nice guy).&lt;p&gt;Then the upgrades to Win95, 98 (oooh Web desktop!), installing RedHat 5.2 (no, not RHEL 5.2), reading PC Plus and any magazine that mentioned Linux in an effort to learn more (dialup was expensive), and to make my abysmal VESA graphics card run X, then running FVWM, KDE1 (looked like CDE, how reassuring), GNOME1 (it&amp;#x27;s squishy), KDE2, 3.5 (perfection, everything was configurable) then going back to GNOME2 (it was simple), then abandoning it all after GNOME3 and KDE4 (hmmm a cashew) and going to OSX. All the Linux desktops I used in tandem with Windows XP and 7 to &amp;quot;keep my hand in&amp;quot; both markets.&lt;p&gt;I also dabbled with BeOS; it was really really fast. Upon examination in recent years, the development API for it was really simple too. Pity the wxWidgets wrapper for it was shut down.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s amazing what having rubbish hardware will make you investigate.&lt;p&gt;How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go &amp;quot;wow&amp;quot; (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of &amp;quot;this is really great and USEFUL&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;this is really pretty&amp;quot;, the joy of getting X to run, or learning a new Linux command whilst stuck in the CLI, getting VNC to work, doing X-window forwarding. I miss the lack of Internet, the fact that knowledge of systems came through hard work and patience, through reading and waiting for the next month&amp;#x27;s magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ant6n</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure about the &amp;#x27;huge strides&amp;#x27;. I feel nowadays with &amp;#x27;flat design&amp;#x27; (is that the right term?) I don&amp;#x27;t know where I can click and what actions will be performed. It&amp;#x27;s like the UI is a bunch of text labels, but they may actually be links, but they may actually perform an action. Although there&amp;#x27;s no way to know, since the label doesn&amp;#x27;t say what action is performed, and since we don&amp;#x27;t have mice anymore, we don&amp;#x27;t have hover-hints.&lt;p&gt;Take as an example the calling apps in Android. It&amp;#x27;ll show contacts, with name, an avatar, maybe a phone number. Which of these are clickable? Which of these will result in the phone making a call, and which will result into going into looking at the contact? How do I send an SMS rather than call? How do I edit it? How do I get a call history? Every time I use it I click on things without being sure what will happen and I am always surprised at what happens.</text></comment>
<story><title>Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002</title><url>https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mangecoeur</author><text>&amp;gt; clean and neat&lt;p&gt;Really? You miss that special &amp;quot;concrete gray and primary blue&amp;quot; feel?&lt;p&gt;I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the &amp;quot;historic&amp;quot; interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the &amp;quot;classic&amp;quot; theme on modern windows boxes (&amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s faster!&amp;quot; - no, it isn&amp;#x27;t to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to stare at beige rectangles all day).&lt;p&gt;I think engineers have a lot of nostalgia for this old stuff, but it&amp;#x27;s misplaced - interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes. We&amp;#x27;ve given up excessive skeumorphism, but we&amp;#x27;ve kept improvements in design, layout, graphics, and perhaps most importantly we&amp;#x27;ve learned that you need someone with serious visual and UX design skills to make an interface.</text></item><item><author>72deluxe</author><text>I really liked these.&lt;p&gt;This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware.&lt;p&gt;After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 because my machine wasn&amp;#x27;t powerful enough to run Windows 95... How a second-hand 486DX was a revelation. 16MB of RAM! Unfathomable! What could use so MUCH RAM????&lt;p&gt;I also remember faffing with config.sys etc. to unload mouse drivers so I could run games that moaned about himem.sys in DOS. And telling every game that I really did have an Adlib sound card and a SoundBlaster 16. I really didn&amp;#x27;t. It was a £7.50 soundcard I bought from a boy at school (who now works at Amazon and has software patents, well done to him! He was really clever, wrote games, played piano like a pro too. Nice guy).&lt;p&gt;Then the upgrades to Win95, 98 (oooh Web desktop!), installing RedHat 5.2 (no, not RHEL 5.2), reading PC Plus and any magazine that mentioned Linux in an effort to learn more (dialup was expensive), and to make my abysmal VESA graphics card run X, then running FVWM, KDE1 (looked like CDE, how reassuring), GNOME1 (it&amp;#x27;s squishy), KDE2, 3.5 (perfection, everything was configurable) then going back to GNOME2 (it was simple), then abandoning it all after GNOME3 and KDE4 (hmmm a cashew) and going to OSX. All the Linux desktops I used in tandem with Windows XP and 7 to &amp;quot;keep my hand in&amp;quot; both markets.&lt;p&gt;I also dabbled with BeOS; it was really really fast. Upon examination in recent years, the development API for it was really simple too. Pity the wxWidgets wrapper for it was shut down.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s amazing what having rubbish hardware will make you investigate.&lt;p&gt;How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go &amp;quot;wow&amp;quot; (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of &amp;quot;this is really great and USEFUL&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;this is really pretty&amp;quot;, the joy of getting X to run, or learning a new Linux command whilst stuck in the CLI, getting VNC to work, doing X-window forwarding. I miss the lack of Internet, the fact that knowledge of systems came through hard work and patience, through reading and waiting for the next month&amp;#x27;s magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcamera</author><text>I have used pretty much all MS operating systems as well, except windows 10, and I remember how windows XP felt &amp;quot;too colourful and distracting&amp;quot; when it first came out (with those very bright green grassy hills wallpaper, along with green and blue taskbar), how Vista&amp;#x27;s start menu was so slow when compared to XP, how windows 7 grouping of programs in the task bar, showing only the program&amp;#x27;s icon, was painful, or how terrible windows 8 entire user experience was.&lt;p&gt;While many engineers have a lot of nostalgia for old stuff, much of it is not displaced. Interfaces got a lot better, for those people who are not completely acquainted with computers. But power users, such as many engineers, still use terminals and other tools that while less intuitive, are much more powerful.</text></comment>