19 ms·

Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

638 points by r3bl 11y ago

szastupov 11y ago
A good old Russian site linux.org.ru has a huge archive of Linux screenshots (1999-), you should check it out http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/archive/ http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/archive/
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  This is where I got started using Linux. Oh the memories. I even have some of my (terrible) screenshots on there and had submitted a bunch of news articles and hundreds of comments. Now I don't even remember my username.
  - szastupov 11y ago
    Oh the memories of nights spent downloading sources on Dial-Up and nights compiling them on Gentoo. Back then we all had hope for the bright future for Linux on desktop, but it never made it, now we are all on OSX :/
    - distances 11y ago
      Most of my developer colleagues indeed are using OSX, and have for years already. Using Stetson-Harrison method, we have 80% OSX / 10% Linux / 10% Windows.
    - humanfromearth 11y ago
      Gentoo: My linux educator. The fact that you needed to make your own kernel and configure a lot of things on your own made me learn a lot about Linux and GNU. Much more than debian or redhat. There is great value in that I think.
    - mordocai 11y ago
      To be fair, I use Debian at work and gentoo on both my personal boxes. So not all of us are on OS X (though my work laptop is a macbook since I didn't get a choice).
    - toothbrush 11y ago
      Speak for yourself, i use GNU/Linux everywhere, even on the PHB-supplied Apple notebook. You can pry my comforting illusion of freedom from my cold, dead hands!¹ :) 1. I refer to the multitude of binary blobs required to make anything work these days. Lamentable.
    - oldpond 11y ago
      +1 i3wm on Archlinux until I bought a Mac. Every once in awhile I get itch to go back. Then I go for a walk and the urge passes. :) Thx for sharing.
- nobleach 11y ago
  I can't thank you enough for this link. This is the exact nostalgia boost I needed. (Many nights while in college, computer parts all over my apartment floor, installing FreeBSD, NetBSD, Slackware, Debian on different boxes just because) I tried every possible WM/Desktop I could find.
jpkeisala 11y ago
Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.
- eggie 11y ago
  It is impressive how far that's come. It would be nice to do this again on modern systems.
  - nindalf 11y ago
    I guess its possible to ask all of these people, apart from Dennis Ritchie :(
- Narishma 11y ago
  More like non-existent than bad.
  - Symbiote 11y ago
    Anti-aliasing was first introduce to a personal computer in 1989, on the Acorn Archimedes. [1] My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere. I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Jan89_RISCOS.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png
- ajross 11y ago
  Heh, "anti-aliasing". Pretty much without exception (I didn't exhaustively check) these are bitmap fonts. They were hand designed glyph-by-glyph for display on a monochrome monitor. I spend the bulk of 1993-2003 or so staring at text windows made up almost exclusively of the X11 "9x15" font. It's really not bad at all, and occasionally I still fire up an xterm in that just for kicks. Note also that a lot of what you're identifying as "antialiasing" is simple pixel size. You could certainly generate a nicely-filtered font with a pixel height on 15 on modern systems, but on most displays it would be unreadably small. Typical programmers are working with fonts with literally twice the resolution these days.
toothbrush 11y ago
I find it amusing how almost each paragraph starts with “My desktop is quite boring, but…” :)
sengork 11y ago
So both creators of C used Windows...
- zerr 11y ago
  Not on those screenshots, but C++ creator Stroustrup is also a Windows user.
  - bluedino 11y ago
    For some reason every picture I've seen of his office, he's parked in front of a Sun of some sort.
    - zerr 11y ago
      I believe at that time, for the office, he didn't have much choice :)
- mondoshawan 11y ago
  Only insofar as they used them as gateways to other machines. Ritchie was on a Plan 9 box, and Kernighan was in other various machines via X
  - hollerith 11y ago
    That's not completely true. Some anti-Microsoft types (about 15 or 20 years ago) were outraged after it was pointed out that (according to the headers of the posts) Ritchie's posts to the 9fans mailing list were being sent from Microsoft Outlook. Maybe the lesson here is that people who accomplish a lot tend to be pragmatic?
- raverbashing 11y ago
  And Windows is written in C Your point is?
- frou_dh 11y ago
  K&R wrote the book. R(&T) created the language.
trengrj 11y ago
Strange I submitted the same link earlier.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467460
eccstartup 11y ago
Terminal changes very little.
- toothbrush 11y ago
  Kids these days use all kinds of fancy throbbing, pulsating and gyrating add-ons using for example oh-my-zsh [0] and the like. 0. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
TurboHaskal 11y ago
That Return to Castle Wolfenstein screenshot... Thanks for reminding me that I'm getting old.
- sengork 11y ago
  RTCW:ET is still well and alive thank you.
  - ue_ 11y ago
    Yeah, there's lots of active servers - but it's dying. I think many servers are filled more by bots than people. That said, it's great fun if you know where to play. RTCW is also fun on singleplayer mode.. and it runs natively on GNU/Linux.
    - Narishma 11y ago
      It's been dying for the past decade. People still play it.
- leftnode 11y ago
  I had the same exact response. "RtCW is 13+ years old!?" I spent so much time with that game.
- artmageddon 11y ago
  That got my attention as well. There was another person with the game in their dock, which I noticed first. I may have to install it from Steam and play it again sometime..
PudgePacket 11y ago
The itunes interface hasn't changed much in the last 13 years. Not many software products go that long without a major reskin, especially seeing as it came from a company that prides itself on it's progressive design.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  I quite miss the brushed metal look. It is interesting that you could take OSX from back then and put it in front of someone today and it'll behave mostly the same. Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments (GNOME3, Unity etc.) or Windows 8/10. Windows 10 you can to some extent. Thought provoking.
  - creshal 11y ago
    > Windows 10 you can to some extent. Only compared to Windows 7 or Vista maybe. Definitely no compared to, NT4/Me/2000/XP from back then. > Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments I'm still wondering what the Unity/Gnome/KDE devs smoke. From what I've gathered from Gnome users, the only way to make it bearable is by ripping out half its functionality and replacing it with (Gnome-specific) extensions. That can't be the way forward, can it? (Although non-mainstream Linux desktops are an exception, too: Openbox e.g. didn't change too much over the last five or so years I've been using it, but it's so vastly configurable that my configuration has massively evolved over the years, and I figure it's similar for most of its users.)
    - sfilipov 11y ago
      That's the thing with Linux - if you don't like the default DE/WM because it changes too much, then use one which doesn't. User friendly distros pack things like Openbox or i3 with some sensible defaults. I am always "sudo apt-get install i3" and "git clone dotfiles" away from a configured tiling window manager if that's what I'm after.
    - ant6n 11y ago
      lxde ftw
72deluxe 11y ago
I really liked these. 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. 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'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???? 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'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). 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'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 "keep my hand in" both markets. 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. It's amazing what having rubbish hardware will make you investigate. How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", 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's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.
- weland 11y ago
  > 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. They also look like someone tried to come up with their own ideas. Everything today is flat, sketchy, inexpressive and boring. > How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", 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's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart. I sometimes find myself thinking the same, but I guess it's the slow pace that allowed me to fixate that knowledge that I miss. We made a lot of these discoveries by piecing together various puzzles. It forced us to think what happens "underneath". Nowadays, when everything is a "how to X" Google search away, you need a little discipline to keep thinking, instead of blindly following instructions.
hankmander 11y ago
The tiling window manager wasn't invented yet? All of these screenshots look like floating window hell. Thank god we live in the future!
- mbrock 11y ago
  ratpoison was started in 2000, I think... inspired by this: http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/inspiration.html http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/inspiration.html I've been using it since around 2003 or 2004... Except I don't use the tiling stuff. I like to live in a kind of retro future. My laptop has a retina display that I mostly use for full screen black xterms with a font about the size to fit 80 characters.
- a3n 11y ago
  fvwm could be tiled.
- fulafel 11y ago
  What's in dmr's drawterm looks pretty tiled to me.
  - jff 11y ago
    That's acme, Plan 9's answer to emacs that does a really good job of managing tiled (text-only) "windows". It also served as an inspiration to the wmii tiling window manager on Linux
- yankcrime 11y ago
  There was at least Ion and Ratpoison (mentioned elsewhere ITT).
- pivo 11y ago
  The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)
  - Xophmeister 11y ago
longwave 11y ago
Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one. Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.
- joosters 11y ago
  I've tried it a few times, but it's just so painful when you want things to align. Now, if you had a really good code layout tool that could 'snap' parts of lines so that they horizontally align at sensible places, I think non-monospace fonts could be useful. In fact, having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. I work in emacs and it's frustrating when the editor decides to 'fix' your own spacing because the editor-mode doesn't have a very intelligent layout system...
  - lazyjones 11y ago
    > having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. The "smart" magic you are looking for is called "tabs".
    - jff 11y ago
      And they will fight you every step of the way, every time you suggest they use the indentation character for indentation.
  - bmn_ 11y ago
    http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
  - jjuhl 11y ago
    I recommend clang-format : http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html
  - jff 11y ago
    Your indentation levels will show up correctly, and that's really all that matters. Relax. Or, if you really care, switch to Go and use gofmt.
Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
"Richard Stallman, july 2002: I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode." Classic RMS
- hoorayimhelping 11y ago
  aloof, self-centered, unhelpful. Classic.
  - nilved 11y ago
    You're right that it's unhelpful. 1/3 isn't that bad.
  - vessenes 11y ago
    I'd go with 'honest' and 'blunt'.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    His life's work on the other hand is definitely helpful, to all of us.
apas 11y ago
You know you've made it when you can casually say “I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode.” Badass Richard.
- lighthawk 11y ago
  He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time, because he disagrees with using sites that might somehow involve something that isn't free source, or because he just delegates to others the task of surfing the web and getting information for him. He definitely spends a lot of time emailing though. I admire him a lot. From some discussion with him and what I've read, I have the feeling that he is in a constant battle with much of the world to try to get them to free all software. I really can't say for certain whether he is really going too far, but his dedication and courage go far beyond what most people are capable of. Even if you disagree with him, it's difficult not to admire him for that.
  - sasvari 11y ago
    He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time just as a side note, not that I think he's wasting his precious time like us anyway: at least for vim, there's a nice plugin [0] for reading HN. most probably there would be something for his emacs/org-mode as well. [0] https://github.com/ryanss/vim-hackernews https://github.com/ryanss/vim-hackernews
    - coldpie 11y ago
      This is the very last thing I need.
    - suprjami 11y ago
      Stallman using vim. Good joke.
    - gmfawcett 11y ago
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
Hey, the PHP creator included a selfie! (Full disclosure: I write PHP on a daily basis, and reject the opinion that it should be avoided for various reasons, but I recognise the stereotype (that it's not a very 'good' language) enough to derive humour from it - consider it sort of self-deprecating)
- i336_ 11y ago
  In all fairness, it's what I switched from VB to. My current position is that HHVM's existence means that PHP is a serious contender and kicking it out the window is probably not the greatest of ideas. The fact that it doesn't have good console interaction support out of the box kind of killed it for me though. Once my computer setup's stable (this 1024x768 laptop screen isn't that great for dev work :p) I'm going to be looking at some other languages. I don't mind PHP overall, and since it's so widespread if I want a small script that'll almost certainly run "in most places" I'm likely to turn to PHP. (To continue the console argument, though, it's entirely possible that php[-cli] might not be installed, only the Apache module, which is annoying.) Similarly, if I was to build a major "community-oriented" project which I wanted to succeed... I might actually write it in PHP because it's such a simple language to work with and learn (at least it was in my case). My personal goal is to keep it a "minority" language, though. Going forward, if I write for my own purposes I want to try and use other things, and if I had to use PHP internally somewhere I wouldn't be that impressed. :p
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    Friends don't let friends use PHP. > since it's so widespread if I want a small script that'll almost certainly run "in most places" I'm likely to turn to PHP I'm curious about this though—isn't sh literally required by the POSIX standard? How is PHP more ubiquitous than sh? I certainly don't have PHP installed.
    - i336_ 11y ago
      Good point. A "small script" might not necessarily be very simple - it might only have 5-10 lines, but those lines might involve parsing HTML, connecting to a remote host somewhere, running a one-time listening server, nontrivially processing a set of files... any number of different tasks. sh is good for job execution, piping and redirection, and task management, and it launches processes like sed, grep, and awk to handle text processing. Beyond that, simple, one-time HTML parsing can be done with sed and grep, but it doesn't work very well (and I'd never use it in production), I can't really easily connect to a server without netcat or socat (or, in a pinch, bash's exec operator, which is slow in practice - I wrote an IRC bot in bash, its CPU usage skyrocketed easily), or for more complex tasks involving HTTP requests, curl or wget. It's ultimately impossible to know whether someone has Python, Perl, Tcl, Haskell, Ruby, Node.js, or even PHP installed, and able to run console scripts... but only a language like one of these comes with a base library competent enough to include functionality to achieve all the goals I noted above.
fauria 11y ago
xwinman still has some 2000s screenshots from many desktop and window managers: http://xwinman.org/ http://xwinman.org/
plg 11y ago
notable how many (all but one?) use a text-only email client
- bluedino 11y ago
  Black on bright white, non-smoothed, bitmapped fonts. My eyes!
currysausage 11y ago
"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I like things to work fast, not be bogged down with decompressing music, etc." (Jon Hall)
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    How this is true. My brother had an Elonex Pentium 120Mhz laptop, and that was truly brought to its knees when playing an MP3. Playing mods and xms was alright, unless they were complicated. Encoding MP3s was another thing altogether - I was wowed when a schoolmate had a dual CPU machine that ENCODED faster than it ripped CDs. I could only dream of such a thing - encoding was far far far slower than reading the data from the CD in the first place.
    - tpurves 11y ago
      Yep I remember this too. In my engineering college days 97/98 in the 90s we were fairly aggressive early adopters of mp3s. We quickly learned that to reliably dj a party with just mp3s you needed at least someone with a 133MHz Pentium to not stutter or have issues on any tracks.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486DX processor at 100MHz that was exactly on the boundary. It could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer codec: WinAMP was not quite fast enough. It was a lovely little machine that I set up to dual-boot Linux. If it had had mobile networking it would have been fantastic.
    - jandrese 11y ago
tammer 11y ago
The most surprising thing about these is the stark reminder of Microsoft's dominance during this era. Whether it's the terminal emulator running on NT4 or Internet Explorer being the only sensible browser on a Mac, Microsoft has fallen far with this crowd.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Very true. They succeeded in getting a desktop into most homes. Staying fashionable is more difficult.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- gdubs 11y ago
  This brought back memories for me. Around this time I was in school running 3D graphics packages on NT. SGI was losing out to commodity graphics cards, NT was fast and stable, and OSX was just starting to trickle in to our labs (and would become dominant within several years with the explosion of the PowerBook titanium.
bsd_ 11y ago
That smoking spy icon in Ritchie's screenshot gives me flashbacks to mid-90s childhood. I remember seeing it around quite a bit for a while, but can't remember where. Anyone know where it's from?
- benjarrell 11y ago
  It is a face, aka picon. It reminds me of the GameSpy logo. It appears to be the default face for unknown. Info about faces in Plan 9: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Adding_your_face/index.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Adding_your_face/index... doesn't seem to load but is cached is http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CkBURrovRf0J:plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Adding_your_face/index.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CkBURro... Database of faces/picons: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/ http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/
- f2f 11y ago
  the original paper describing "faces" is here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/face_the_nation/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/face_the_nation/
amelius 11y ago
My desktop looks much more boring than these. But then again, I'm using multiple "workspaces" :)
ant6n 11y ago
One thing to note: the aspect ratio of the screens. No 16:9 or 16:10 back in that day. (Do some of them almost look square, or maybe rotated 4:3?)
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  The way I remember it is 4:3 was by far the most common aspect ratio of the day (it's 640:480 and 1024:768).
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  Moolenar's screenshot is 1280x1024, or 5:4.
ponytech 11y ago
It would be interesting to see how their desktop is today!
- andersju 11y ago
  Seeing the interest this generated, I'm working on a follow-up :)
lottin 11y ago
That was before we had Firefox, when the only graphical web browser available in most Linux distros was Netscape, which was barely usable. Also most fonts were bitmap fonts, not the nice scalable fonts of today.
- etrain 11y ago
  The Mozilla Suite existed and wasn't that bad, even in 99/00 when I started using Linux. Konqueror was also pretty decent. The web also wasn't as central to the Internet experience then (irc, pop3 clients, and so on were pretty prevalent.) Most of my time in a web browser was spent checking slashdot, googling for things, and so on.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- foldor 11y ago
  I believe you have replied to the wrong news post. Were you referring to the one about uBlock Origin being denied on the Chrome Web Store by chance?
  - LesZedCB 11y ago
    oops, yeah. something weird happened with the tabs I guess. thanks for pointing that out!
thebouv 11y ago
I miss my fluxbox wm and my Linux dev box. I stick to OS X now for my Desktop, though I do think back wistfully sometimes.
GPGPU 11y ago
What a great idea! Every monday I take a picture of myself. I think I'll add a photo of my computer desktop and a picture of my physical office space, too. Those will be fascinating 10, 20, 30 years from now. (I'm 53 so I don't know how much further I'd go!)
draw_down 11y ago
This is right around the time I used a Mac for the first time in years and was blown away. Everything else looked and worked like this stuff, clunky. Or perhaps I just prefer a different sort of clunkiness.
GPGPU 11y ago
BTW: The Jerkcity web comic shown in one of those screenshots is still going strong as a daily web comic: http://jerkcity.com/ http://jerkcity.com/
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I find it remarkable how little my "desktop" has changed since 2002. Like most of the people sampled I've got a browser up which has HN, mail, newsblur, pinned and then a bunch of tabs that have opened up as a result of those three. And counting I've got 11 Term2 windows up across the two screens and my laptop screen. And one really slow app I have to run talk to some enterprise apps but pretty much a browser and xterms is all I need for the most part to do work.
anentropic 11y ago
Stallman wins again :) also... woah, old iTunes
EdiX 11y ago
Does anyone know why Dennis Ritchie's screenshot has all that noise? It's almost like it was printed and then scanned back.
- ShinyCyril 11y ago
  That particular image is a GIF with a reduced palette of 8 bits per pixel, whereas the rest seem to be full-colour PNGs. http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fanders.unix.se%2Fimages%2Fdmr_screenshot.gif http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fanders.unix....
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - andersju 11y ago
    Yup. It's the untouched gif he sent me.
nanoojaboo 11y ago
very forward thinking to ask for those
0x54MUR41 11y ago
Why the creator of PHP was mentioned in this post?
xdinomode 11y ago
Richard Stallman is a legend. While most of us blindly agree to terms and conditions for crap proprietary software, he doesn't even need a GUI. He's one of my top inspirations. Edit: grammar
- cobalt 11y ago
  while I applaud him for sticking to his convictions, thats like saying that one should walk everywhere because we didn't used to have cars/don't need them
  - Synaesthesia 11y ago
    With time I'm starting to realize he's essentially correct in everything he says. We are really chained to corporations due to non-open hardware and software, and they're almost completely unaccountable to us.
  - unsignedint 11y ago
    The way I see is, to make a political point, someone has to be extreme in his cause to be not called out for hypocrisy, and I feel like that's where he is...
thoughtexpt 11y ago
Apparently I have something in common with RMS. Although it took me many years with all the other graphical options to get to that point. Memory access problems while using Xorg was the last straw. I will never go back to any graphics layer, except perhaps I might use a framebuffer. No modern graphical operating system is worth my time. Text mode is fast and highly portable.
fluxquanta 11y ago
Really diggin' Rob Malda's Ryoko background.
- jff 11y ago
  cmdrtaco's screenshot is a great example of how, back in 2002, we hadn't yet learned "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    I dunno, the idea that we could have fun with, or at least be enjoying, the thing we spend all day dealing with doesn't seem like something we shouldn't be doing. Plus he's got what, a slightly dodgey font going on? That's hardly ostentatious.
veb 11y ago
Is it just me or was I the only one who saw how awesome this is: http://unix.se/ http://unix.se/ Here's the screengrab http://share.veb.nz/1UD8UE6 http://share.veb.nz/1UD8UE6 in case you guys don't see it... I think it's awesome. I want it! Definitely gonna update my 404 pages, heh.
- broken 11y ago
  I enjoyed it, too! It reminded me of the Sburb loading screen from Homestuck: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002037 http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002037
  - HCIdivision17 11y ago
    And of course - for those who need Homestuck explained - that's a great throwback to the SimCity games, specifically here where the loading screens would often include nonsensical things like the famouse "reticulating splines". (IIRC, a lot of the Maxis games of Yore would play off that joke.) (And thanks - now the Sburb loading theme is stuck in my head again!)
glenntzke 11y ago
I find it interesting how often the phrase "[my desktop] is pretty boring" is said in a nearly shameful manner. These people that were producing content with their computers that was anything but boring (in the practical, effective sense) still felt that their screenshots lacked mystique and beauty. Well, then there's CmdrTaco's desktop :3
tremendo 11y ago
No green-on-black terminals? So disappointed.
urs2102 11y ago
Did people primarily not use terminal multiplexers like GNU Screen back then (or like tmux today)? It seems to be a lot of windows all over the place. Other than that, jumping a little ahead --I remember getting Windows XP in late 2001, early 2002. Everything looked so nice and shiny - it may have been the last time I was so unbelievably impressed with Windows. I'm not sure why I liked it so much - either because the UI (at the time) looked gorgeous, or because I was in second grade. Realistically, it was the latter.
- rconti 11y ago
  I know I, for one, stopped using screen as soon as I started using X Windows. I'm okay with overlapping windows, that's what my window manager handles really well. I've started using screen again for long-running processes so i can detach and reattach later.
- asjo 11y ago
  Windows XP looked like Fischer-Price toys, so maybe it was a combination of the graphics and your age!
xoai 11y ago
Wow. I feel like I am touching a part of history!
_jomo 11y ago
Anyone looking for Unix screenshots of 2015 should have a look at the /r/unixporn [0] subreddit. As the name suggest, it's a collection of really nice-looking *nix systems, usually providing all the details to "reproduce" the setup. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn
lordnacho 11y ago
Do people these days even have a "my desktop"? My work is a whole bunch of VM screens, accessible from anywhere. Also they are all a mix of OSes...
- emidln 11y ago
  I have a command launch that pops up when I hit the windows key and a gnome-terminal, chrome, and slack open that I can alt-tab through. These are always full screen. I think my background is purplish.
mikegirouard 11y ago
What an excellent post. This inspired me to dig up an old screenshot from the same time: https://web.archive.org/web/20020408224844/http://p0w3r.com/archives/screenshots/wmaker0.8.0-01.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20020408224844/http://p0w3r.com/... Most likely this was on a Red Hat desktop I was running (before the enterprise switch). Man, I really miss running WindowMaker…
amyhliao 11y ago
hi
amyhliao 11y ago
birdperson
BorisMelnik 11y ago
Really enjoyed this. I hate to say it but I get more sentimental looking at these than I do most family pictures. The old Netscape logo really hit me hard. One reason I am now going to start screenshting things from now on and archiving them :)
- aembleton 11y ago
  I had the same sentimental pang. I've just spent the last hour going through old files trying to find an old screen grab. Found this [1], but it was probably more about me trying to show how shiny and clean my desktop was at the time so I didn't have any windows open. But, it shows the Mozilla logo before I finally moved to Firefox. I think this would have been around 2001 or 2002. I don't know how I was so happy with a 640x480 screen. 1. http://i.imgur.com/zK73D36.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zK73D36.jpg
tunesmith 11y ago
Ha, an exmh sighting! I used MH for years before I finally crumpled.
lholden 11y ago
I can understand how Stallman felt... To an extent. Through the early 90s (92 and 93)... I avoided X. Didn't see a reason for it... As I had everything I needed on the console. Then again... I had to downgrade my ram from 8 megs to 4 when switched to my 486. Booting up X and its associated apps kinda stressed my memory. By 2002 I was certainly running a graphical desktop. Can't say I remember which. Never really got into Windows outside of gaming. I was most likely using Windowmaker.
shinnok 11y ago
I ran a pet project website back in 2010, userdesktops.org, with the sole aim of collecting all desk shots from the top forums back in the day, posted in the infamous and usually pinned threads, titled "Post your desktop" or "Show off". I compiled a pile of scripts on top of wget, curl, httrack, ImageMagick and customized a Firefox build to allow for easy scraping from the most common bulletin scripts in use at the time. As the project's sole aim was pure nostalgia and server hosting and bandwidth were quite expensive back then I quickly put it to rest after no more than an year I think. Now I'm kinda sorry for not leaving at least the scraping to go on for longer, I'm pretty sure the forums queue was cut short of at least a couple hundred potential targets and god knows how many desktops. Anyways, I've scoured for my old server backups and lo and behold, here are 2362 pure shots of geeky nostalgia: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz62Jn3RBbYSbVNsdGlqSzI1Qk0&usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz62Jn3RBbYSbVNsdGlq...
pixel67 11y ago
A bit dated wouldn't you say?

638 points by r3bl 11y ago

A good old Russian site linux.org.ru has a huge archive of Linux screenshots (1999-), you should check it out http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/archive/ http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/archive/

IgorPartola 11y ago
This is where I got started using Linux. Oh the memories. I even have some of my (terrible) screenshots on there and had submitted a bunch of news articles and hundreds of comments. Now I don't even remember my username.
- szastupov 11y ago
  Oh the memories of nights spent downloading sources on Dial-Up and nights compiling them on Gentoo. Back then we all had hope for the bright future for Linux on desktop, but it never made it, now we are all on OSX :/
  - distances 11y ago
    Most of my developer colleagues indeed are using OSX, and have for years already. Using Stetson-Harrison method, we have 80% OSX / 10% Linux / 10% Windows.
  - humanfromearth 11y ago
    Gentoo: My linux educator. The fact that you needed to make your own kernel and configure a lot of things on your own made me learn a lot about Linux and GNU. Much more than debian or redhat. There is great value in that I think.
  - mordocai 11y ago
    To be fair, I use Debian at work and gentoo on both my personal boxes. So not all of us are on OS X (though my work laptop is a macbook since I didn't get a choice).
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    Speak for yourself, i use GNU/Linux everywhere, even on the PHB-supplied Apple notebook. You can pry my comforting illusion of freedom from my cold, dead hands!¹ :) 1. I refer to the multitude of binary blobs required to make anything work these days. Lamentable.
  - oldpond 11y ago
    +1 i3wm on Archlinux until I bought a Mac. Every once in awhile I get itch to go back. Then I go for a walk and the urge passes. :) Thx for sharing.
nobleach 11y ago
I can't thank you enough for this link. This is the exact nostalgia boost I needed. (Many nights while in college, computer parts all over my apartment floor, installing FreeBSD, NetBSD, Slackware, Debian on different boxes just because) I tried every possible WM/Desktop I could find.

jpkeisala 11y ago

Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.

eggie 11y ago
It is impressive how far that's come. It would be nice to do this again on modern systems.
- nindalf 11y ago
  I guess its possible to ask all of these people, apart from Dennis Ritchie :(
Narishma 11y ago
More like non-existent than bad.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Anti-aliasing was first introduce to a personal computer in 1989, on the Acorn Archimedes. [1] My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere. I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Jan89_RISCOS.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png
ajross 11y ago
Heh, "anti-aliasing". Pretty much without exception (I didn't exhaustively check) these are bitmap fonts. They were hand designed glyph-by-glyph for display on a monochrome monitor. I spend the bulk of 1993-2003 or so staring at text windows made up almost exclusively of the X11 "9x15" font. It's really not bad at all, and occasionally I still fire up an xterm in that just for kicks. Note also that a lot of what you're identifying as "antialiasing" is simple pixel size. You could certainly generate a nicely-filtered font with a pixel height on 15 on modern systems, but on most displays it would be unreadably small. Typical programmers are working with fonts with literally twice the resolution these days.

toothbrush 11y ago

I find it amusing how almost each paragraph starts with “My desktop is quite boring, but…” :)

sengork 11y ago

So both creators of C used Windows...

zerr 11y ago
Not on those screenshots, but C++ creator Stroustrup is also a Windows user.
- bluedino 11y ago
  For some reason every picture I've seen of his office, he's parked in front of a Sun of some sort.
  - zerr 11y ago
    I believe at that time, for the office, he didn't have much choice :)
mondoshawan 11y ago
Only insofar as they used them as gateways to other machines. Ritchie was on a Plan 9 box, and Kernighan was in other various machines via X
- hollerith 11y ago
  That's not completely true. Some anti-Microsoft types (about 15 or 20 years ago) were outraged after it was pointed out that (according to the headers of the posts) Ritchie's posts to the 9fans mailing list were being sent from Microsoft Outlook. Maybe the lesson here is that people who accomplish a lot tend to be pragmatic?
raverbashing 11y ago
And Windows is written in C Your point is?
frou_dh 11y ago
K&R wrote the book. R(&T) created the language.

trengrj 11y ago

Strange I submitted the same link earlier.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467460

eccstartup 11y ago

Terminal changes very little.

toothbrush 11y ago
Kids these days use all kinds of fancy throbbing, pulsating and gyrating add-ons using for example oh-my-zsh [0] and the like. 0. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

TurboHaskal 11y ago

That Return to Castle Wolfenstein screenshot... Thanks for reminding me that I'm getting old.

sengork 11y ago
RTCW:ET is still well and alive thank you.
- ue_ 11y ago
  Yeah, there's lots of active servers - but it's dying. I think many servers are filled more by bots than people. That said, it's great fun if you know where to play. RTCW is also fun on singleplayer mode.. and it runs natively on GNU/Linux.
  - Narishma 11y ago
    It's been dying for the past decade. People still play it.
leftnode 11y ago
I had the same exact response. "RtCW is 13+ years old!?" I spent so much time with that game.
artmageddon 11y ago
That got my attention as well. There was another person with the game in their dock, which I noticed first. I may have to install it from Steam and play it again sometime..

PudgePacket 11y ago

The itunes interface hasn't changed much in the last 13 years. Not many software products go that long without a major reskin, especially seeing as it came from a company that prides itself on it's progressive design.

72deluxe 11y ago
I quite miss the brushed metal look. It is interesting that you could take OSX from back then and put it in front of someone today and it'll behave mostly the same. Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments (GNOME3, Unity etc.) or Windows 8/10. Windows 10 you can to some extent. Thought provoking.
- creshal 11y ago
  > Windows 10 you can to some extent. Only compared to Windows 7 or Vista maybe. Definitely no compared to, NT4/Me/2000/XP from back then. > Sadly the same could not be sad about mainstream Linux environments I'm still wondering what the Unity/Gnome/KDE devs smoke. From what I've gathered from Gnome users, the only way to make it bearable is by ripping out half its functionality and replacing it with (Gnome-specific) extensions. That can't be the way forward, can it? (Although non-mainstream Linux desktops are an exception, too: Openbox e.g. didn't change too much over the last five or so years I've been using it, but it's so vastly configurable that my configuration has massively evolved over the years, and I figure it's similar for most of its users.)
  - sfilipov 11y ago
    That's the thing with Linux - if you don't like the default DE/WM because it changes too much, then use one which doesn't. User friendly distros pack things like Openbox or i3 with some sensible defaults. I am always "sudo apt-get install i3" and "git clone dotfiles" away from a configured tiling window manager if that's what I'm after.
  - ant6n 11y ago
    lxde ftw

72deluxe 11y ago

I really liked these. 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. 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'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???? 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'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). 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'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 "keep my hand in" both markets. 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. It's amazing what having rubbish hardware will make you investigate. How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", 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's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.

weland 11y ago
> 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. They also look like someone tried to come up with their own ideas. Everything today is flat, sketchy, inexpressive and boring. > How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", 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's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart. I sometimes find myself thinking the same, but I guess it's the slow pace that allowed me to fixate that knowledge that I miss. We made a lot of these discoveries by piecing together various puzzles. It forced us to think what happens "underneath". Nowadays, when everything is a "how to X" Google search away, you need a little discipline to keep thinking, instead of blindly following instructions.

hankmander 11y ago

The tiling window manager wasn't invented yet? All of these screenshots look like floating window hell. Thank god we live in the future!

mbrock 11y ago
ratpoison was started in 2000, I think... inspired by this: http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/inspiration.html http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/inspiration.html I've been using it since around 2003 or 2004... Except I don't use the tiling stuff. I like to live in a kind of retro future. My laptop has a retina display that I mostly use for full screen black xterms with a font about the size to fit 80 characters.
a3n 11y ago
fvwm could be tiled.
fulafel 11y ago
What's in dmr's drawterm looks pretty tiled to me.
- jff 11y ago
  That's acme, Plan 9's answer to emacs that does a really good job of managing tiled (text-only) "windows". It also served as an inspiration to the wmii tiling window manager on Linux
yankcrime 11y ago
There was at least Ion and Ratpoison (mentioned elsewhere ITT).
pivo 11y ago
The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)
- Xophmeister 11y ago

longwave 11y ago

Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one. Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

joosters 11y ago
I've tried it a few times, but it's just so painful when you want things to align. Now, if you had a really good code layout tool that could 'snap' parts of lines so that they horizontally align at sensible places, I think non-monospace fonts could be useful. In fact, having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. I work in emacs and it's frustrating when the editor decides to 'fix' your own spacing because the editor-mode doesn't have a very intelligent layout system...
- lazyjones 11y ago
  > having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. The "smart" magic you are looking for is called "tabs".
  - jff 11y ago
    And they will fight you every step of the way, every time you suggest they use the indentation character for indentation.
- bmn_ 11y ago
  http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
- jjuhl 11y ago
  I recommend clang-format : http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html
- jff 11y ago
  Your indentation levels will show up correctly, and that's really all that matters. Relax. Or, if you really care, switch to Go and use gofmt.

Bouncingsoul1 11y ago

"Richard Stallman, july 2002: I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode." Classic RMS

hoorayimhelping 11y ago
aloof, self-centered, unhelpful. Classic.
- nilved 11y ago
  You're right that it's unhelpful. 1/3 isn't that bad.
- vessenes 11y ago
  I'd go with 'honest' and 'blunt'.
- dasil003 11y ago
  His life's work on the other hand is definitely helpful, to all of us.

apas 11y ago

You know you've made it when you can casually say “I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode.” Badass Richard.

lighthawk 11y ago
He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time, because he disagrees with using sites that might somehow involve something that isn't free source, or because he just delegates to others the task of surfing the web and getting information for him. He definitely spends a lot of time emailing though. I admire him a lot. From some discussion with him and what I've read, I have the feeling that he is in a constant battle with much of the world to try to get them to free all software. I really can't say for certain whether he is really going too far, but his dedication and courage go far beyond what most people are capable of. Even if you disagree with him, it's difficult not to admire him for that.
- sasvari 11y ago
  He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time just as a side note, not that I think he's wasting his precious time like us anyway: at least for vim, there's a nice plugin [0] for reading HN. most probably there would be something for his emacs/org-mode as well. [0] https://github.com/ryanss/vim-hackernews https://github.com/ryanss/vim-hackernews
  - coldpie 11y ago
    This is the very last thing I need.
  - suprjami 11y ago
    Stallman using vim. Good joke.
  - gmfawcett 11y ago

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago

Hey, the PHP creator included a selfie! (Full disclosure: I write PHP on a daily basis, and reject the opinion that it should be avoided for various reasons, but I recognise the stereotype (that it's not a very 'good' language) enough to derive humour from it - consider it sort of self-deprecating)

i336_ 11y ago
In all fairness, it's what I switched from VB to. My current position is that HHVM's existence means that PHP is a serious contender and kicking it out the window is probably not the greatest of ideas. The fact that it doesn't have good console interaction support out of the box kind of killed it for me though. Once my computer setup's stable (this 1024x768 laptop screen isn't that great for dev work :p) I'm going to be looking at some other languages. I don't mind PHP overall, and since it's so widespread if I want a small script that'll almost certainly run "in most places" I'm likely to turn to PHP. (To continue the console argument, though, it's entirely possible that php[-cli] might not be installed, only the Apache module, which is annoying.) Similarly, if I was to build a major "community-oriented" project which I wanted to succeed... I might actually write it in PHP because it's such a simple language to work with and learn (at least it was in my case). My personal goal is to keep it a "minority" language, though. Going forward, if I write for my own purposes I want to try and use other things, and if I had to use PHP internally somewhere I wouldn't be that impressed. :p
- toothbrush 11y ago
  Friends don't let friends use PHP. > since it's so widespread if I want a small script that'll almost certainly run "in most places" I'm likely to turn to PHP I'm curious about this though—isn't sh literally required by the POSIX standard? How is PHP more ubiquitous than sh? I certainly don't have PHP installed.
  - i336_ 11y ago
    Good point. A "small script" might not necessarily be very simple - it might only have 5-10 lines, but those lines might involve parsing HTML, connecting to a remote host somewhere, running a one-time listening server, nontrivially processing a set of files... any number of different tasks. sh is good for job execution, piping and redirection, and task management, and it launches processes like sed, grep, and awk to handle text processing. Beyond that, simple, one-time HTML parsing can be done with sed and grep, but it doesn't work very well (and I'd never use it in production), I can't really easily connect to a server without netcat or socat (or, in a pinch, bash's exec operator, which is slow in practice - I wrote an IRC bot in bash, its CPU usage skyrocketed easily), or for more complex tasks involving HTTP requests, curl or wget. It's ultimately impossible to know whether someone has Python, Perl, Tcl, Haskell, Ruby, Node.js, or even PHP installed, and able to run console scripts... but only a language like one of these comes with a base library competent enough to include functionality to achieve all the goals I noted above.

fauria 11y ago

xwinman still has some 2000s screenshots from many desktop and window managers: http://xwinman.org/ http://xwinman.org/

plg 11y ago

notable how many (all but one?) use a text-only email client

bluedino 11y ago
Black on bright white, non-smoothed, bitmapped fonts. My eyes!

currysausage 11y ago

"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I like things to work fast, not be bogged down with decompressing music, etc." (Jon Hall)

raverbashing 11y ago
Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  How this is true. My brother had an Elonex Pentium 120Mhz laptop, and that was truly brought to its knees when playing an MP3. Playing mods and xms was alright, unless they were complicated. Encoding MP3s was another thing altogether - I was wowed when a schoolmate had a dual CPU machine that ENCODED faster than it ripped CDs. I could only dream of such a thing - encoding was far far far slower than reading the data from the CD in the first place.
  - tpurves 11y ago
    Yep I remember this too. In my engineering college days 97/98 in the 90s we were fairly aggressive early adopters of mp3s. We quickly learned that to reliably dj a party with just mp3s you needed at least someone with a 133MHz Pentium to not stutter or have issues on any tracks.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486DX processor at 100MHz that was exactly on the boundary. It could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer codec: WinAMP was not quite fast enough. It was a lovely little machine that I set up to dual-boot Linux. If it had had mobile networking it would have been fantastic.
  - jandrese 11y ago

tammer 11y ago

The most surprising thing about these is the stark reminder of Microsoft's dominance during this era. Whether it's the terminal emulator running on NT4 or Internet Explorer being the only sensible browser on a Mac, Microsoft has fallen far with this crowd.

72deluxe 11y ago
Very true. They succeeded in getting a desktop into most homes. Staying fashionable is more difficult.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
gdubs 11y ago
This brought back memories for me. Around this time I was in school running 3D graphics packages on NT. SGI was losing out to commodity graphics cards, NT was fast and stable, and OSX was just starting to trickle in to our labs (and would become dominant within several years with the explosion of the PowerBook titanium.

bsd_ 11y ago

That smoking spy icon in Ritchie's screenshot gives me flashbacks to mid-90s childhood. I remember seeing it around quite a bit for a while, but can't remember where. Anyone know where it's from?

benjarrell 11y ago
It is a face, aka picon. It reminds me of the GameSpy logo. It appears to be the default face for unknown. Info about faces in Plan 9: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Adding_your_face/index.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Adding_your_face/index... doesn't seem to load but is cached is http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CkBURrovRf0J:plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Adding_your_face/index.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CkBURro... Database of faces/picons: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/ http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/
f2f 11y ago
the original paper describing "faces" is here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/face_the_nation/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/face_the_nation/

amelius 11y ago

My desktop looks much more boring than these. But then again, I'm using multiple "workspaces" :)

ant6n 11y ago

One thing to note: the aspect ratio of the screens. No 16:9 or 16:10 back in that day. (Do some of them almost look square, or maybe rotated 4:3?)

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
The way I remember it is 4:3 was by far the most common aspect ratio of the day (it's 640:480 and 1024:768).
SamReidHughes 11y ago
Moolenar's screenshot is 1280x1024, or 5:4.

ponytech 11y ago

It would be interesting to see how their desktop is today!

andersju 11y ago
Seeing the interest this generated, I'm working on a follow-up :)

lottin 11y ago

That was before we had Firefox, when the only graphical web browser available in most Linux distros was Netscape, which was barely usable. Also most fonts were bitmap fonts, not the nice scalable fonts of today.

etrain 11y ago
The Mozilla Suite existed and wasn't that bad, even in 99/00 when I started using Linux. Konqueror was also pretty decent. The web also wasn't as central to the Internet experience then (irc, pop3 clients, and so on were pretty prevalent.) Most of my time in a web browser was spent checking slashdot, googling for things, and so on.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

foldor 11y ago
I believe you have replied to the wrong news post. Were you referring to the one about uBlock Origin being denied on the Chrome Web Store by chance?
- LesZedCB 11y ago
  oops, yeah. something weird happened with the tabs I guess. thanks for pointing that out!

thebouv 11y ago

I miss my fluxbox wm and my Linux dev box. I stick to OS X now for my Desktop, though I do think back wistfully sometimes.

GPGPU 11y ago

What a great idea! Every monday I take a picture of myself. I think I'll add a photo of my computer desktop and a picture of my physical office space, too. Those will be fascinating 10, 20, 30 years from now. (I'm 53 so I don't know how much further I'd go!)

draw_down 11y ago

This is right around the time I used a Mac for the first time in years and was blown away. Everything else looked and worked like this stuff, clunky. Or perhaps I just prefer a different sort of clunkiness.

GPGPU 11y ago

BTW: The Jerkcity web comic shown in one of those screenshots is still going strong as a daily web comic: http://jerkcity.com/ http://jerkcity.com/

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I find it remarkable how little my "desktop" has changed since 2002. Like most of the people sampled I've got a browser up which has HN, mail, newsblur, pinned and then a bunch of tabs that have opened up as a result of those three. And counting I've got 11 Term2 windows up across the two screens and my laptop screen. And one really slow app I have to run talk to some enterprise apps but pretty much a browser and xterms is all I need for the most part to do work.

anentropic 11y ago

Stallman wins again :) also... woah, old iTunes

EdiX 11y ago

Does anyone know why Dennis Ritchie's screenshot has all that noise? It's almost like it was printed and then scanned back.

ShinyCyril 11y ago
That particular image is a GIF with a reduced palette of 8 bits per pixel, whereas the rest seem to be full-colour PNGs. http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fanders.unix.se%2Fimages%2Fdmr_screenshot.gif http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fanders.unix....
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- andersju 11y ago
  Yup. It's the untouched gif he sent me.

nanoojaboo 11y ago

very forward thinking to ask for those

0x54MUR41 11y ago

Why the creator of PHP was mentioned in this post?

xdinomode 11y ago

Richard Stallman is a legend. While most of us blindly agree to terms and conditions for crap proprietary software, he doesn't even need a GUI. He's one of my top inspirations. Edit: grammar

cobalt 11y ago
while I applaud him for sticking to his convictions, thats like saying that one should walk everywhere because we didn't used to have cars/don't need them
- Synaesthesia 11y ago
  With time I'm starting to realize he's essentially correct in everything he says. We are really chained to corporations due to non-open hardware and software, and they're almost completely unaccountable to us.
- unsignedint 11y ago
  The way I see is, to make a political point, someone has to be extreme in his cause to be not called out for hypocrisy, and I feel like that's where he is...

thoughtexpt 11y ago

Apparently I have something in common with RMS. Although it took me many years with all the other graphical options to get to that point. Memory access problems while using Xorg was the last straw. I will never go back to any graphics layer, except perhaps I might use a framebuffer. No modern graphical operating system is worth my time. Text mode is fast and highly portable.

fluxquanta 11y ago

Really diggin' Rob Malda's Ryoko background.

jff 11y ago
cmdrtaco's screenshot is a great example of how, back in 2002, we hadn't yet learned "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
- Avshalom 11y ago
  I dunno, the idea that we could have fun with, or at least be enjoying, the thing we spend all day dealing with doesn't seem like something we shouldn't be doing. Plus he's got what, a slightly dodgey font going on? That's hardly ostentatious.

veb 11y ago

Is it just me or was I the only one who saw how awesome this is: http://unix.se/ http://unix.se/ Here's the screengrab http://share.veb.nz/1UD8UE6 http://share.veb.nz/1UD8UE6 in case you guys don't see it... I think it's awesome. I want it! Definitely gonna update my 404 pages, heh.

broken 11y ago
I enjoyed it, too! It reminded me of the Sburb loading screen from Homestuck: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002037 http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002037
- HCIdivision17 11y ago
  And of course - for those who need Homestuck explained - that's a great throwback to the SimCity games, specifically here where the loading screens would often include nonsensical things like the famouse "reticulating splines". (IIRC, a lot of the Maxis games of Yore would play off that joke.) (And thanks - now the Sburb loading theme is stuck in my head again!)

glenntzke 11y ago

I find it interesting how often the phrase "[my desktop] is pretty boring" is said in a nearly shameful manner. These people that were producing content with their computers that was anything but boring (in the practical, effective sense) still felt that their screenshots lacked mystique and beauty. Well, then there's CmdrTaco's desktop :3

tremendo 11y ago

No green-on-black terminals? So disappointed.

urs2102 11y ago

Did people primarily not use terminal multiplexers like GNU Screen back then (or like tmux today)? It seems to be a lot of windows all over the place. Other than that, jumping a little ahead --I remember getting Windows XP in late 2001, early 2002. Everything looked so nice and shiny - it may have been the last time I was so unbelievably impressed with Windows. I'm not sure why I liked it so much - either because the UI (at the time) looked gorgeous, or because I was in second grade. Realistically, it was the latter.

rconti 11y ago
I know I, for one, stopped using screen as soon as I started using X Windows. I'm okay with overlapping windows, that's what my window manager handles really well. I've started using screen again for long-running processes so i can detach and reattach later.
asjo 11y ago
Windows XP looked like Fischer-Price toys, so maybe it was a combination of the graphics and your age!

xoai 11y ago

Wow. I feel like I am touching a part of history!

_jomo 11y ago

Anyone looking for Unix screenshots of 2015 should have a look at the /r/unixporn [0] subreddit. As the name suggest, it's a collection of really nice-looking *nix systems, usually providing all the details to "reproduce" the setup. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn

lordnacho 11y ago

Do people these days even have a "my desktop"? My work is a whole bunch of VM screens, accessible from anywhere. Also they are all a mix of OSes...

emidln 11y ago
I have a command launch that pops up when I hit the windows key and a gnome-terminal, chrome, and slack open that I can alt-tab through. These are always full screen. I think my background is purplish.

mikegirouard 11y ago

What an excellent post. This inspired me to dig up an old screenshot from the same time: https://web.archive.org/web/20020408224844/http://p0w3r.com/archives/screenshots/wmaker0.8.0-01.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20020408224844/http://p0w3r.com/... Most likely this was on a Red Hat desktop I was running (before the enterprise switch). Man, I really miss running WindowMaker…

amyhliao 11y ago

birdperson

BorisMelnik 11y ago

Really enjoyed this. I hate to say it but I get more sentimental looking at these than I do most family pictures. The old Netscape logo really hit me hard. One reason I am now going to start screenshting things from now on and archiving them :)

aembleton 11y ago
I had the same sentimental pang. I've just spent the last hour going through old files trying to find an old screen grab. Found this [1], but it was probably more about me trying to show how shiny and clean my desktop was at the time so I didn't have any windows open. But, it shows the Mozilla logo before I finally moved to Firefox. I think this would have been around 2001 or 2002. I don't know how I was so happy with a 640x480 screen. 1. http://i.imgur.com/zK73D36.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zK73D36.jpg

tunesmith 11y ago

Ha, an exmh sighting! I used MH for years before I finally crumpled.

lholden 11y ago

I can understand how Stallman felt... To an extent. Through the early 90s (92 and 93)... I avoided X. Didn't see a reason for it... As I had everything I needed on the console. Then again... I had to downgrade my ram from 8 megs to 4 when switched to my 486. Booting up X and its associated apps kinda stressed my memory. By 2002 I was certainly running a graphical desktop. Can't say I remember which. Never really got into Windows outside of gaming. I was most likely using Windowmaker.

shinnok 11y ago

I ran a pet project website back in 2010, userdesktops.org, with the sole aim of collecting all desk shots from the top forums back in the day, posted in the infamous and usually pinned threads, titled "Post your desktop" or "Show off". I compiled a pile of scripts on top of wget, curl, httrack, ImageMagick and customized a Firefox build to allow for easy scraping from the most common bulletin scripts in use at the time. As the project's sole aim was pure nostalgia and server hosting and bandwidth were quite expensive back then I quickly put it to rest after no more than an year I think. Now I'm kinda sorry for not leaving at least the scraping to go on for longer, I'm pretty sure the forums queue was cut short of at least a couple hundred potential targets and god knows how many desktops. Anyways, I've scoured for my old server backups and lo and behold, here are 2362 pure shots of geeky nostalgia: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz62Jn3RBbYSbVNsdGlqSzI1Qk0&usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz62Jn3RBbYSbVNsdGlq...

pixel67 11y ago

A bit dated wouldn't you say?