8 ms·

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 distracti

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.
- idid 11y ago
  That last phrase is really quotable! Agreed.
- apricot 11y ago
  > the joy of getting X to run I think you mean "the joy of having X finally running". The actual "getting it to run" part was pretty much the polar opposite of joy.
  - weland 11y ago
    Yeah, "the joy of getting X to run" part didn't really resonate with me, either :-)
shubhamjain 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. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why we were advised that we should save our work often because the whole thing was so damn unreliable.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Haha yes true. Windows 95 second release wasn't so bad. But as you said, 98 was bad. It was better with service packs. You realised what junk it was when you looked at 98's task manager compared to NT's and XP's.
- jcadam 11y ago
  If you thought Win98 was bad, you need to try WinME :) Windows 2000, however, was the pinnacle of MS Operating Systems. It has been downhill ever since.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!
    - krylon 11y ago
      As a software user, I appreciate that. But having worked on a Win32 application for two years, I am glad I will never again have to touch that pile of poo. At the time it was created, Win32 might have been a nice API, given the underpowered machines it was designed to run on. But compared to building GUIs on a POSIX-ish system using Gtk+, it was an incredible pain. I can understand why many Windows developers were so happy to embrace .Net; one might like it or dislike it, but it is a huge improvement on Win32. (As for MFC/AFX, I only had the most fleeting contact with it, so I cannot say for sure.)
mangecoeur 11y ago
> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to stare at beige rectangles all day). I think engineers have a lot of nostalgia for this old stuff, but it's misplaced - interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes. We've given up excessive skeumorphism, but we've kept improvements in design, layout, graphics, and perhaps most importantly we've learned that you need someone with serious visual and UX design skills to make an interface.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  In Windows it is a bit odd anyway, as anything drawn using GDI or GDI+ goes through the CPU. This includes the "classic" interface. For accelerated interfaces (Aero), the GPU is involved (but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?), so on rubbish GPUs it may be slower than going through the CPU, perhaps? Windows should tell you that your computer is rubbish so won't attempt to use the Aero interface. If you elect to not use the Aero interface, it'll then attempt to mimic the Aero interface entirely in software using GDI+. This is indeed far slower, as the command to draw a series of lines and bevels obviously means more CPU calls than a single "draw grey rectangle" command. The interface is not drawn using precached bitmaps, but is done by software commands. More complicated drawing = more CPU = slower Windows gives the option to turn off effects like shadows and transparency, window contents whilst dragging etc. in "performance" options in Control Panel, as these would mean more CPU calls (there's more drawing going on). If it wasn't faster, why would it be under "performance"? But as you state, to a human perceptible degree it may not be noticed. I find that opening Windows Explorer on Windows XP is a far faster drawing experience than opening it on Windows 7, where it needs to fade into view and then redraw the tree on the left, the pane on the right, the toolbar with gradients (gradients are not free!), the "places" tree above the tree on the left (how confusing), and the giant blue panel that sits at the bottom to draw a picture of a computer in addition to the status bar. File Manager on Windows 3.1 was really fast by comparison. EDIT: Actually, on OSX I am left with "whitewashed concrete grey" with "primary pre-school colour" red orange and green. Full circle really!
i336_ 11y ago
FWIW, I swore I was looking at Win98, and was surprised to learn (it's on the page, straight from Dennis Richie himself) that that's actually WinNT4. I would never have guessed. I plan to get my 486SX put back together; here's hoping it works. It has 8MB of RAM. (And an SB16... and a radio card... and I recently came upon an ISA ethernet card which hopefully works.....) :D I remember the first time I enabled Web view in '98 and discovered View Source in my desktop menu. I closed Notepad very quickly. lol I'm looking forward to building CDE and running it, FWIW. Hopefully I can get it working on something appropriately old! :P BeOS et. al. FTW. I hope to seriously play around with it sometime soon. The reason I commented was because I've historically had terrible hardware too :P but it's made me realize how much old/unoptimized/inefficient hardware is so badly needed by developers today... new computers are like new cars, strong, silent types, not like the old noisy tech of old where you could get a visceral idea of what you were doing by sensing the system lag - like on my old 800MHz Duron I was using earlier this year, the mouse cursor could lag four different ways and I knew what each one meant (disk I/O, swapping to death, CPU usage by one process, or CPU usage by many processes). On this note, Netflix' new internal Flux monitoring system is interesting, it provides an "unconscious-compatible" view of data in the same vein. And yeah, I saw the Netscape screenshots. The scrollbars look really cool IMO. You might like to look into http://xpra.org http://xpra.org, it's sort of VNC + "wow". :P What else is there... You might like to have a look at http://vmwaros.blogspot.com http://vmwaros.blogspot.com Haxial KDX might be a fun (pointless :P) thing to chase... Hm, I can't think of anything else. The x86 assembler in bash that was on here last fortnight comes to mind, but nothing else is coming to mind right now...
SonicSoul 11y ago
right on. I still remember that day of someone on IRC boasting about running multiple instances of Netscape in addition to IRC. I was like.. wow! such luxuries! Maybe next year I can upgrade my cpu/ram to get to the multi browser instance club
famousactress 11y ago
> I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware This is not consistent with my memory of the time.
- ashark 11y ago
  Definitely. Listening to an MP3 while browsing the internet? Hope you like pops and skips every time you load a new page. Starting a game? Better close everything first. Hitting swap? Have fun sl...ow....l...y... moving your cursor where you want it. Applied to Windows and Linux both, with the bonus on Linux that X11 couldn't even move windows around the screen without all kinds of artifacts and stuttering. Then again, you can't even fit a single browser tab with Gmail open in the RAM they ran on, so you gotta cut them some slack. However, BeOS was practically miraculous and suffered few or none of those problems on the same hardware. That it didn't survive the OS wars is proof that we are not in the Best Timeline.
jdcarter 11y ago
I saw a demo of BeOS at MacWorld (Jan 1996 I think) that blew my mind. The guy started a video playing. He started playing a 16-track audio arrangement. He opened a web browser and more. Flipping between apps, the video player never lagged, the audio never skipped, you could adjust the audio mix instantly... it's like that BeBox could do anything and everything, all at once. And the hardware that BeBox was running: two PowerPC 603e's. This was not the powerful PowerPC of the era, it was the crummy, low-cost one. They ran at a measly 66MHz. BeOS could drive those things like nothing else, though, it was amazing.
FireBeyond 11y ago
"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." The only thing 'disappointing' in this is you didn't/didn't mention countless attempts to get E(nlightenment) running. After an overnight compile, of course!
- mreiland 11y ago
  > The only thing 'disappointing' in this is you didn't/didn't mention countless attempts to get E(nlightenment) running. After an overnight compile, of course! lmao. I so badly wanted to check it out, but couldn't for the longest time because it was such a pita to deal with. Years later I finally got it installed successfully and found it wasn't as snazzy as I had hoped sigh. Oh well, such fond memories of old skool linux :)
rayiner 11y ago
Man I miss BeOS. I do not, however, miss WinModems.

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.

idid 11y ago
That last phrase is really quotable! Agreed.
apricot 11y ago
> the joy of getting X to run I think you mean "the joy of having X finally running". The actual "getting it to run" part was pretty much the polar opposite of joy.
- weland 11y ago
  Yeah, "the joy of getting X to run" part didn't really resonate with me, either :-)

shubhamjain 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. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware. Are you kidding? It was nightmare to do anything on Windows 98. There were so many things that could result in "dead" state and only solution was to restart and not to mention those frequent BSOD. There was a reason why we were advised that we should save our work often because the whole thing was so damn unreliable.

72deluxe 11y ago
Haha yes true. Windows 95 second release wasn't so bad. But as you said, 98 was bad. It was better with service packs. You realised what junk it was when you looked at 98's task manager compared to NT's and XP's.
jcadam 11y ago
If you thought Win98 was bad, you need to try WinME :) Windows 2000, however, was the pinnacle of MS Operating Systems. It has been downhill ever since.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!
  - krylon 11y ago
    As a software user, I appreciate that. But having worked on a Win32 application for two years, I am glad I will never again have to touch that pile of poo. At the time it was created, Win32 might have been a nice API, given the underpowered machines it was designed to run on. But compared to building GUIs on a POSIX-ish system using Gtk+, it was an incredible pain. I can understand why many Windows developers were so happy to embrace .Net; one might like it or dislike it, but it is a huge improvement on Win32. (As for MFC/AFX, I only had the most fleeting contact with it, so I cannot say for sure.)

mangecoeur 11y ago

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to stare at beige rectangles all day). I think engineers have a lot of nostalgia for this old stuff, but it's misplaced - interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes. We've given up excessive skeumorphism, but we've kept improvements in design, layout, graphics, and perhaps most importantly we've learned that you need someone with serious visual and UX design skills to make an interface.

72deluxe 11y ago
In Windows it is a bit odd anyway, as anything drawn using GDI or GDI+ goes through the CPU. This includes the "classic" interface. For accelerated interfaces (Aero), the GPU is involved (but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?), so on rubbish GPUs it may be slower than going through the CPU, perhaps? Windows should tell you that your computer is rubbish so won't attempt to use the Aero interface. If you elect to not use the Aero interface, it'll then attempt to mimic the Aero interface entirely in software using GDI+. This is indeed far slower, as the command to draw a series of lines and bevels obviously means more CPU calls than a single "draw grey rectangle" command. The interface is not drawn using precached bitmaps, but is done by software commands. More complicated drawing = more CPU = slower Windows gives the option to turn off effects like shadows and transparency, window contents whilst dragging etc. in "performance" options in Control Panel, as these would mean more CPU calls (there's more drawing going on). If it wasn't faster, why would it be under "performance"? But as you state, to a human perceptible degree it may not be noticed. I find that opening Windows Explorer on Windows XP is a far faster drawing experience than opening it on Windows 7, where it needs to fade into view and then redraw the tree on the left, the pane on the right, the toolbar with gradients (gradients are not free!), the "places" tree above the tree on the left (how confusing), and the giant blue panel that sits at the bottom to draw a picture of a computer in addition to the status bar. File Manager on Windows 3.1 was really fast by comparison. EDIT: Actually, on OSX I am left with "whitewashed concrete grey" with "primary pre-school colour" red orange and green. Full circle really!

i336_ 11y ago

FWIW, I swore I was looking at Win98, and was surprised to learn (it's on the page, straight from Dennis Richie himself) that that's actually WinNT4. I would never have guessed. I plan to get my 486SX put back together; here's hoping it works. It has 8MB of RAM. (And an SB16... and a radio card... and I recently came upon an ISA ethernet card which hopefully works.....) :D I remember the first time I enabled Web view in '98 and discovered View Source in my desktop menu. I closed Notepad very quickly. lol I'm looking forward to building CDE and running it, FWIW. Hopefully I can get it working on something appropriately old! :P BeOS et. al. FTW. I hope to seriously play around with it sometime soon. The reason I commented was because I've historically had terrible hardware too :P but it's made me realize how much old/unoptimized/inefficient hardware is so badly needed by developers today... new computers are like new cars, strong, silent types, not like the old noisy tech of old where you could get a visceral idea of what you were doing by sensing the system lag - like on my old 800MHz Duron I was using earlier this year, the mouse cursor could lag four different ways and I knew what each one meant (disk I/O, swapping to death, CPU usage by one process, or CPU usage by many processes). On this note, Netflix' new internal Flux monitoring system is interesting, it provides an "unconscious-compatible" view of data in the same vein. And yeah, I saw the Netscape screenshots. The scrollbars look really cool IMO. You might like to look into http://xpra.org http://xpra.org, it's sort of VNC + "wow". :P What else is there... You might like to have a look at http://vmwaros.blogspot.com http://vmwaros.blogspot.com Haxial KDX might be a fun (pointless :P) thing to chase... Hm, I can't think of anything else. The x86 assembler in bash that was on here last fortnight comes to mind, but nothing else is coming to mind right now...

SonicSoul 11y ago

right on. I still remember that day of someone on IRC boasting about running multiple instances of Netscape in addition to IRC. I was like.. wow! such luxuries! Maybe next year I can upgrade my cpu/ram to get to the multi browser instance club

famousactress 11y ago

> I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware This is not consistent with my memory of the time.

ashark 11y ago
Definitely. Listening to an MP3 while browsing the internet? Hope you like pops and skips every time you load a new page. Starting a game? Better close everything first. Hitting swap? Have fun sl...ow....l...y... moving your cursor where you want it. Applied to Windows and Linux both, with the bonus on Linux that X11 couldn't even move windows around the screen without all kinds of artifacts and stuttering. Then again, you can't even fit a single browser tab with Gmail open in the RAM they ran on, so you gotta cut them some slack. However, BeOS was practically miraculous and suffered few or none of those problems on the same hardware. That it didn't survive the OS wars is proof that we are not in the Best Timeline.

jdcarter 11y ago

I saw a demo of BeOS at MacWorld (Jan 1996 I think) that blew my mind. The guy started a video playing. He started playing a 16-track audio arrangement. He opened a web browser and more. Flipping between apps, the video player never lagged, the audio never skipped, you could adjust the audio mix instantly... it's like that BeBox could do anything and everything, all at once. And the hardware that BeBox was running: two PowerPC 603e's. This was not the powerful PowerPC of the era, it was the crummy, low-cost one. They ran at a measly 66MHz. BeOS could drive those things like nothing else, though, it was amazing.

FireBeyond 11y ago

"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." The only thing 'disappointing' in this is you didn't/didn't mention countless attempts to get E(nlightenment) running. After an overnight compile, of course!

mreiland 11y ago
> The only thing 'disappointing' in this is you didn't/didn't mention countless attempts to get E(nlightenment) running. After an overnight compile, of course! lmao. I so badly wanted to check it out, but couldn't for the longest time because it was such a pita to deal with. Years later I finally got it installed successfully and found it wasn't as snazzy as I had hoped sigh. Oh well, such fond memories of old skool linux :)

rayiner 11y ago

Man I miss BeOS. I do not, however, miss WinModems.