23 ms·

Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)

553 points by maxmouchet 8y ago

black-tea 8y ago
Most of these were from Windows 95. They got some slight cosmetic improvements in 98 and then again for 2000 if I remember correctly.
- bluedino 8y ago
  The big change was in Windows 9x the icons were 16-color, unless you had a 16-bit color display (even 256 color graphics cards used 16 color icons because of palette swapping between applications). https://imgur.com/GpS5Dln https://imgur.com/GpS5Dln
asaph 8y ago
Meh. They look very dated to me.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  That's because they're from 1995... The point of the article was that they represent great design, not that they look current 25 years later.
  - asaph 8y ago
    Great design stands the test of time. e.g. TrueType fonts from that era are still used today. (Actually the designs of many of those fonts are substantially older than their TrueType implementations.) These icons haven't aged well IMO. They looked cheesy back in the day and they still do today.
    - asaph 8y ago
      Microsoft was never regarded as a force in graphic design. That was more of Apple's wheelhouse.
      - msla 8y ago
        And Apple logos and icons look cheesy, too.
      - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        To be fair, early OS X hadn't aged well at all either, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time.
        anthk 8y ago
        OSX Tiger is ideal. Modern-ish, colourful and huge clicky widgets.
- satysin 8y ago
  Age does not stop something from being great. The Matrix is 20 years old this year, it is dated, it is still awesome.
  - asaph 8y ago
    That's not what "dated" means in this context. It means the artifact is stuck in its time period and not well suited for the modern era. So if the Matrix is still awesome, then it's not dated.
  - implements 8y ago
    The matrix is a simulation of the past (the late 90s) - which is a great film idea because it means even the presence of deep CRT monitors doesn't date the movie - unlike (say) in "Alien", where they do (imo).
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      I don't know, the whole aesthetic of the Alien universe is so coherent and well thought out that they don't really stand out to me.
azhenley 8y ago
I'm sure we will go full circle back to that style soon enough, but with higher resolution and expanded color palette.
- tobr 8y ago
  I think the small palette is a big part of the charm. It’s limited enough to give the whole set a coherent look, but large enough to illustrate any kind of object.
yzb 8y ago
You should've linked to the https version of the page so the dozens of icons load faster (because of http2 multiplexing) https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/ https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/
linux2647 8y ago
I also think the aesthetic of classic Mac OS, like versions 8 and 9, as well as BeOS had great design that made it easy to know what widgets were what and how to interact with them.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  Yes! The "Platinum" aesthetic in classic Mac OS was great. Simple aesthetic, easy to follow for custom UI elements. Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
deleted 8y ago
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talkyroom 8y ago
Totally agree with you
amiga-workbench 8y ago
Windows 2000 was just about the peak of desktop interfaces from a usability and efficiency standpoint, its really only missing out on window snapping and workspaces (which is kinda a crutch for bad window management like on OSX)
veridies 8y ago
While they may have been good for the time, it’s pretty hard to distinguish a lot of these while looking at my smartphone, especially when I’m not wearing glasses.
- timbit42 8y ago
  Back then people had 640x480 screens.
raphlinus 8y ago
You might want to consider adding "image-rendering: pixelated" to your CSS; on a high-dpi monitor, these render with bilinear interpolation, which I think doesn't do justice to the crispness of these icons.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Agreed, though with this sort of pixel art you really want either Lanczos, or some palette-based scaling like hq#x. That way you will preserve the "crisp", high-frequency content in the original image as much as possible while not introducing artifacts like a "blocky" appearance (instead, the result is smooth but crisp, like a watercolor painting). (In fact, I wish modern desktop environments did this automatically on HiDPI screens while keeping the original pixel art as their source-- especially for its improved usability on lower-res displays, which are still widely used, both on desktop and mobile. Instead we tend to get SVG, which while extremely crisp on high-res displays is a mess for the original 16x16 or 32x32 use case.)
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    What is the problem with 'blocky' appearance? All of those filters produce icons in their own aesthetic. If the point is to preserve their pixellation when why bother with filters?
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      > If the point is to preserve their pixellation The "point" of pixel art-- what makes it so convenient for graphicians, even amateur ones-- is not the blocky appearance (what you call "pixelated" - but in fact these icons did not appear "blocky" on the CRT screens that were in common use at the time!), but to set a uniform constraint on fine detail (and sometimes color depth) within the image, and then to maximize quality while staying within that constraint. It is perfectly consistent to want a means of rendering these images that preserves whatever level of detail was in the original while not introducing blocky artifacts.
      - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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untog 8y ago
By the criteria outlined in the article I would have thought the Windows 95 icons would be the ideal - they're essentially the same but without the "flashy" gradients and other depth indications. Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now that's the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  the gradients have just enough aesthetics IMO kinda like NT5 fading.. it added a bit of information but without distraction nor cost (unlike today UX)
- drivers99 8y ago
  Later in the thread they determined the virus detection was a false positive.
bepvte 8y ago
I tried very hard using bash scripting and some recursive archive extraction stuff to get all the icons out... but I couldnt get all the names, and I got a lot of false positives. Id be interested to know how the author did this.
laurentdc 8y ago
I feel like older user interfaces treated me like an adult. Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around. I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/ [1] http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png [2] https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.576210/ https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.57621...
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Early OS X [2] in no way looks like a "workstation" UI. It looks like an interface for a toy. Solaris [1] UI certainly does though!
- untog 8y ago
  Early OS X looked like a weird candyland to me. Not as lurid as XP, sure, but the 3D-like glassy buttons and the sliding animation as you minimised something always struck me as kind of overkill.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    When Jobs first showed off the Aqua UI, he was pretty excited about the æsthetics and what Quartz could do. There were also many practical things shown, but…
    - bitwize 8y ago
      "I want to lick it!"
  - protomyth 8y ago
    It was quite the shock coming to OS X from NeXTSTEP. I actually ran with NeXTSTEP icons on OS X for a lot of years until they made it super hard with SIP.
  - 8y ago
jenscow 8y ago
Amazingly, moricons.dll is still included with Windows 10. This contains icons from Windows 3.0. (it should be called "moreicons.dll", but this was from when filenames had to be 8 + 3 characters long)
- jackfraser 8y ago
  I felt so cool in Grade 5 when I found that file. I had discovered that EXEs could contain icons, and then found some 3rd party program that loaded one from a DLL, so I went opening random DLLs until I saw that filename. What a rush! Where were all those programs? I found out many, but some were still a mystery. This was part of whatever that Win3.1 thing was that would scan your disk for programs it recognized and add them to Program Manager, right?
Gikoskos 8y ago
I love the early Windows design, especially the Windows 2000 look. Other than the well designed icons, I find it to be much more intuitive and consistent than modern Windows GUIs and Metro. Part of the reason why I use the classic style on my Windows 7 machine (the other part is better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/ https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/ Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.
- andai 8y ago
  I can relate. What are your plans for when W7 support is ended?
  - Gikoskos 8y ago
    No plans yet but I guess I'd have to adapt. Do you know of any ways to get that look on 8.1 or 10 natively? At least without having to install a third-party theming app.
    - andai 8y ago
      I think this is the best you can do https://www.howtogeek.com/133405/how-to-get-classic-style-themes-back-on-windows-8/ https://www.howtogeek.com/133405/how-to-get-classic-style-th...
orliesaurus 8y ago
Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don't remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague/friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.
- lb1lf 8y ago
  I showed my son (age nine) a floppy disk a couple of months ago. His immediate comment? "Wow, a 3d-printed save icon!" Sigh.
  - Hurtak 8y ago
    Is this actually happening to lots of parents/kids or is this joke that lots of people copy from each other? https://www.google.com/search?q=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+icon!&oq=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+icon!&aqs=chrome..69i57.927j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+ico...
    - lb1lf 8y ago
      Quite possibly both? I can definitely see where my son is coming from, as he's only seen floppies once in his life, whereas even his Nintendo Switch uses a floppy to indicate that it is saving his progress. Must be baffling. I hadn't felt as old as I did then since I bumped into the first kid who didn't know what a landline was. ("Imagine a cellphone with no battery, so you needed to keep it plugged in at all times...")
      - aasasd 8y ago
        > who didn't know what a landline was I feel like you've been had another time. At least I keep hoping that kids see plenty of those in older movies.
    - 8y ago
_pmf_ 8y ago
BeOS is peak UI design for me. I'm actually working with Haiku OS sometimes to feel this vibe.
- ajmarsh 8y ago
  I 100% agree. The BeOS icon set remains my personal favorite to this day. When I run Linux I usually load them up first thing. https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos
faissaloo 8y ago
I wish we could get a modern spin on this style
alsadi 8y ago
I miss redhat's bluecurve icons. https://www.deviantart.com/redrope/art/Bluecurve-Complete-Icons-1831078 https://www.deviantart.com/redrope/art/Bluecurve-Complete-Ic...
- jackfraser 8y ago
  Yeah, these are excellent. Very BeOS feeling.
  - AckSyn 8y ago
    Oh man, I miss BeOS. It was one of the two OS's I'd bought back in the day. The other was OpenBSD 3 iirc I have the CD around here somewhere, too.
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      I loved the BeOS icons. Spent a lot of time forcing Windows NT 4 to look like it.
- neotek 8y ago
  Oh man, nostalgia wave right there! One of the first things I would do when setting up a new Windows machine was to install that icon pack!
simplecomplex 8y ago
Who was the designer? What’s the license/copyright situation?
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  That's what I came here to ask. I'd be pleasantly surprised if MS decide to allow redistribution.
thanatropism 8y ago
I wish there was a comparison with Windows 95 icons.
altmind 8y ago
I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  The "remove color from all the toolbar icons" thing also happened with Firefox Quantum. And you're right, it's so weird. Perhaps it's a side effect of the ongoing transition to ubiquitous "big", touch-friendly buttons, where a combination of large size and full color would be overly distracting.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    The idea is to increase the contrast between content and chrome, by making chrome itself less visually contrasting. I don't buy into it, though. They tried monochrome grey icons in Visual Studio 2012, and people hated it, for good reasons. So now VS icons have colors again.
- lozenge 8y ago
  That's funny, they tried this with a beta of Visual Studio 2013 as well, and rolled it back. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx?WT.mc_id=-blog-scottha http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/intr... (the hilarious original annoucement) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNewVisualStudioLookAndFeel.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNew... (commentary) https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide/suggestions/3184305-bring-back-full-color-icons-to-visual-studio-2012 https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... (a rollback) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/ux-guidelines/images-and-icons-for-visual-studio?view=vs-2017#BKMK_UsingColorInImages https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/... (Visual Studio 2017 icon color pallette and guidelines)
  - jenscow 8y ago
tempodox 8y ago
Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.
- combatentropy 8y ago
  I remember that noise. I blame Microsoft more than the hardware. From 1984 to about 1994, Macintoshes were my main computer, and they didn't make noise just for moving the mouse or opening a menu. Later, I ran Ubuntu on a computer that used to run Windows XP. The noise and latency that Windows had, just for opening a menu or folder, were replaced by silence and instant action. (Just to be clear, of course all three had to spin the hard drive when I did something major, like opening a file or program. But Windows is the only one where all interactions were erratic.)
  - tempodox 8y ago
    I agree that it wasn't due to the hardware. It's just that today's hardware has gotten so fast that even Microsoft products seem to run almost smoothly.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    And in fact, you still get that noise and activity light on Windows 10 and a spinning-rust HD! On a system that wouldn't even manage to use the RAM completely while running on a sensible Linux install, let alone filling RAM up or swapping to disk. I mean, swapping used to be a fact of life in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even on Linux - RAM was just too cramped back then. But then we got machines with lots and lots of RAM even at the low end, and Linux became snappy and quiet-- while Windows is still as bad as ever.
    - deathanatos 8y ago
      This — constant swapping — is what drove me to Linux. Though, the laptop I am typing this on is still using 16/32 GiB of RAM, mostly due to the "modern" web. (But that's not any operating system's fault.) RAM is, I feel, one of the more precious commodities on a machine, still. I have spinning rust in my machines (more space/$), and I've not regretted it, or really had a need for the speed an SSD could bring. (If anything, I think I'd do a hybrid install, with a small SSD and a large HDD.) But I've never once regretted upgrading RAM on a machine, and I definitely miss it on my work MBP.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I prefer the Windows 95 icons, e.g. http://windows95tips.com/post/35587792563 http://windows95tips.com/post/35587792563
- spronkey 8y ago
  Oh Windows 95... the last MS OS to feel completely uniform in aesthetic design. And that teal... gets me every time. I used to think it was hideously ugly, but these days there's an understated elegance to it that just can't be denied.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    [My comment was really a thinly-veiled excuse to link to windows95tips.com. I don't actually have any aesthetic preferences between the icons/design of different versions of Windows.]
alxlaz 8y ago
Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had: - Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless - Good contrast - Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch-enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else. - Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use. The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate... I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you need to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!
- rsync 8y ago
  "Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent." Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work. One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...
  - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
    What makes up for this, to some extent, is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in OSX: go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click +, select the application (or all applications), type the menu name and set a shortcut.
golem14 8y ago
I found the original Mac, or the DR GEM icons (e.g. on Atari ST) even more utilitarian (could one call them 'brutalist' ?) and may I say 'pleasant'. In that vein, sometimes I wish for a desktop that is grayscale except for exceptional highlights (e.g., photos, warnings, ...). I remember that it was a real pleasure to use the Atari SM124 B&W CRT monitor.
atombender 8y ago
While I don't agree with the article's notion about icons, I think it's true that 1990s UIs, especially Windows and Mac, were particularly productive OSes because they applied not just common UI idioms but standard interactions: Buttons, menus, windows, drag and drop -- everything was largely consistent between each app. With the web, we had a lot of consistency for a while simply because browsers didn't allow much customization. Initially, all links were underlined, and form buttons had to look exactly like the browser presented them. But then CSS happened and all bets were off. Underlining is largely gone as a UI idiom. It's no longer evident if something is a link or button, whether you can right click and do "open in new tab" (often not possible if the link is not a URL but a JavaScript function), and so on. A "native" app like Slack is all over the place in terms of UI consistency, compared the strictness of the old IBM CUA standard and others. One may be productive within a single app, but not all of the idioms translate to other apps. I think we're in a transitional phase where we're halfway between old-style GUIs and something more fluid that approximates real life to a greater degree. Consider the "UI" of a kitchen appliance or the packaging of a new iPhone, or a TV remote control, or just a plain old door. Everyday objects vary wildly in what "idiom" is provided to the user. Some doors have a handle, some have a knob, some have a bar you push. We have the same kind of annoying lack of standards and consistency in the real world, though it's usually evident that you can turn a know and push down on a handle. One can imagine a future where UIs are gesture-based, for example. Think of the 3D UI from Spielberg's Minority Report. Some of these UIs may need to offer completely new way of interacting with objects (grab and make a fist to copy, open your hand wide to paste, or something) that will be difficult to standardize, much like the real world.
- dsego 8y ago
  FYI, these idioms you talk about are called "signifiers", which are signs indicating what you can do.
  - codetrotter 8y ago
    There’s a book that talks about these things called The Design of Everyday Things. I’ve only read parts of it myself but a friend of mine read the whole book and said it was good. From the parts I’ve read I agree. The author has some given some talks and presentations relating to UX as well that can be found on YouTube. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyd... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman
chris_wot 8y ago
The Windows 98 interface was actually not bad. There only issue I had was that to stop the computer you click on Start. :-)
samfisher83 8y ago
I think windows 95/98 interface was great. I don't want ads when I click on the start button. All they needed was to add a search bar and call it a day instead all these ads or apps you don't want.
thothamon 8y ago
No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.
jammygit 8y ago
The icons are nice, but I've never known what 90% of them were supposed to represent. Still can only guess at many of them. I do like the depth though
paulgerhardt 8y ago
There’s a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. 15 years is about half a fashion cycle so you see the goods in their least flattering light. Today that would roughly correspond to looking at Windows Mobile CE interfaces or OSX Panther/Safari 1.0. Anything older and it starts coming back into fashion. The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ a couple of years ago and now this seems to confirm a trend. Certainly so, if you thrown in some art projects like Windows ‘93, recent fashion and music trends around vaporwave and reinterest in PC-9800 emulation. Love it.
- anthk 8y ago
  >There’s a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. Everyone is copying the typefaces and color schemes from the magazines which came in the 70's. >The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ Most of the kids with the ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ meme didn't even use Windows 98 or be even aware of computers. I remember w9x not as a fashion trend, but as a shitty os with a nightmare to manage in order to not crashing while intalling a driver. Installing games took ages, and viruses were a real thing. Also, everything was shareware. Libre software and Linux/BSD were not known outside academics except at very late 90's. If they knew and be alive into that, they woudn't be so fake nostalgical.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    I was alive into all this, and I find it very nostalgic.
gumby 8y ago
From the article: > Rather than some designer’s flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. They had hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols. The change is deliberate and reflects a social shift. In the W98 days computers were primarily seen as work devices, and in particular Windows wanted to distinguish itself from the more playful feeling Mac (which itself chose a more playful feel to address the fear most people felt about their computers. Apple tried to repeat the Mac playful feeling with the iMac and early OS X feel, and while it helped a bit in the consumer market it reinforced that feeling that they weren't for actual work. And though it feels like it, this relationship hasn't changed! The (often forced) playful feeling of modern UIs comes from the phone and the phone was able to succeed there -- even need it -- because 1> people were already comfortable with a non-professional connection to the web, mail, messaging et al and 2> it was a "phone", not a "computer". This didn't worry Nokia or Microsoft at first because they had "professional" devices, and probably we forget the days of carrying a work and personal phone for phone calling. But then since the work phones were so crappy they were able to capture the mindshare. I think it's gone the wrong way: because phones are worth so much, much less effort goes into designing "work" apps, and the designers all start mobile -> web -> desktop.
tengbretson 8y ago
The fact that the article has nearly no content besides "these are cool" and the comments on it say the download has a virus in it makes me very dubious.
tambourine_man 8y ago
Sorry, as a Mac user then and now, they still look as cheesy as they did back then to me. Not that Windows looks nice these days either.
kevindong 8y ago
I hate the frequently excessive usage of icons in modern UIs. In icon-heavy UIs, the meaning/functionality of an icon isn't very clear and labels only show up when you hover a mouse over the icon (you're usually out of luck if you're on mobile).
godot 8y ago
I think nostalgia plays a part for sure, but there's also substance about the old UIs. Looking at Win98 icons reminds me of my days in high school when I would just tinker around Windows for fun, changing icons of shortcuts, make good ol' personal homepages in HTML and Javascript (mostly alert boxes), and play Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2. The icons and the Win98 UI give me pleasant feelings, mostly coming from those experiences. On the substance side -- this isn't exactly about Windows, but in the last couple of years I've tried a variety of Linux distros and DEs. Specifically, I've tried CentOS 7 KDE, Antergos Gnome 3, and Manjaro 18 KDE, all on laptops. There's no doubt that both Antergos and Manjaro bring with them very modern DEs (regardless of Gnome or KDE). But for some reasons, I felt the most productive on the CentOS 7 KDE, even though it looks the most primitive. Before I had the Manjaro laptop, I thought it was a KDE vs Gnome difference (KDE being more similar to Windows, vs Gnome being more similar to macOS, and I generally prefer Windows), but I think it actually does come down to the UI design. CentOS 7's KDE looks very dated, but everything is very functional and took little customization to feel productive in. The difference is similar to Win98/2000 vs Win7/8/10.
vermaden 8y ago
Windows ME/2000 icons were even better. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png
soheil 8y ago
There has been a shift towards UI that gets out of the way and becomes second nature to us. Admittedly that dream hasn't yet fully been realized, but we are on that path. Removing clutter, HDD led light, noiseless computers all imo try to integrate computers ever more fully into our lives and make it as seamless as an integration as possible. One day we may have UI that feels so natural that we might just think of a computer as one of our organs.
alexfringes 8y ago
In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that’s frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum. So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even. Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work. Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.
anthk 8y ago
They irony is that the icons are the opposite to the font colors. Please: https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/
anthk 8y ago
Ok, follow your tip. Look those nice w9x icons? do the same with your fonts. https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/
ggm 8y ago
The designers were a very well coordinated integrated group (if there was more than one of them) and they took design imperatives of a restricted palette and fixed pixel sizes to heart. If you asked the same group to design this now in a world of high dpi high gamut screens they might not get the same constraints out in their design brief. Google's work on flat responsive was in some ways running against the tide. Skuomorphic was hardly ancient when the Google reaction happened
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
regression test failed
openloop 8y ago
imo not really.
canthonytucci 8y ago
great from the same site, possibly nsfw https://alexmeub.com/projects/celery-man/ https://alexmeub.com/projects/celery-man/
michaelaiello 8y ago
Classic Shell helps bring us back to this design. http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/
peterburkimsher 8y ago
I collected 131,788 icons from that era as 32x32 PNG files, and made a simple search program for them. Does anyone have good ideas for using this dataset? https://iconpush.github.io https://iconpush.github.io
the-great-assyr 8y ago
No they are not. Simply no! Wanna some really good and useful icons? Go get them at KDE. Those... Things sucks. Big. Time. Is that some hipster phoney nostalgia article of some sort? Please...
techcarving 8y ago
Yes, no doubt.
jimbo234 8y ago
but where are the emojis
thiht 8y ago
Wow, this entire thread is so weird to read! I find these icons really bad compared to what exists on Windows 10 for example, and yet everyone seems to agree that 98's icons are better! I mean, seeing the icons in the illustration, I have no idea what 3 out of the 6 do. In the image at the bottom of the article it's even worse I'm pretty sure it's just nostalgia, I have no idea why everyone here seems to think they're objectively better
- bromuro 8y ago
  I don’t miss at all those playful icons while using one of the worst windows ever. I hated that mix of Tahoma and MSSansSerif too.
kup0 8y ago
Interesting to see how much current design has affected my gut reaction. At first my mind immediately went to "there's no way this is the case..." But looking at Win98 icons and UI... I really do miss that interface. Contrast and buttons actually being buttons... etc I think (despite my use of Win10 and MacOS for various reasons) that's why I have a love of Linux UIs... many of them hearken back to those days. The Linux DEs I tend to gravitate to are the ones that are most like classic Windows UI
kstenerud 8y ago
I miss Windows 2000. 3.11 and earlier were utter garbage. I was on an Amiga, and so thankfully avoided those steaming piles. 95, 98, and ME were brutal operating systems, crashing all the time, corrupting data, and generally making life hell. There was an NT 3.51 mod that would give it the win95 interface, but there were too many software compatibility issues. Amiga was dead, so I switched to Red Hat. Then came Windows 2000. A nice, clean interface. Speedy operating system. Real memory protection. Most things were in sane places. It got out of your way and let you get real work done. When XP came out, I didn't really see the point. It had graphics that looked like a candy bar and slowed things down enormously. Thankfully, you could disable it. I'm still not sure what they actually improved in that operating system to make actual, real work easier to perform, but whatever they did, it took twice the memory to do it, and required a beefier processor. Then came Vista, which was unbearably slow. I upgraded to XP during this time because my software wouldn't run on 2000 anymore. Windows 7: A New Hope. It was still slow, but it turned out to be not an unbearable upgrade, although I still stuck to XP for as long as I could. Windows 8: Bigger. Slower. Unfathomable. I stuck to 7 through gritted teeth. Now we're at Windows 10. Schizoid is the best word I can use to describe it. Horrible UI half in the Vista world, half in the mobile world, Duplication everywhere, no clear path for getting things done, constant updates at inconvenient times (you can't seem to get even a month of uptime with this OS). I've since switched to Ubuntu, and run my Windows software in Wine.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Broadly agreed, except that I find even Ubuntu to be quite slow these days. Sticking to plain vanilla Debian with a lightweight interface solves this quite nicely - XFCE and LXDE are incredibly snappy even on very low end hardware, quite a bit better than XP at least.
- chaoticmass 8y ago
  I remember Windows 2000 feeling like the height of Windows UI. Changed the gray color theme to a oh so slightly brownish gray which just seemed classy. That oh so subtle drop shadow on your mouse and other UI elements. Retaining all of the psuedo-3D box rendering for windows, buttons, borders, etc. Helpful and consistent signifiers revealing UI functionality at a glance. Then the new-wave of UI designers decided all of this was 'ugly' and needed to be cleaned up. Maybe the new stuff is 'prettier' (subjective) but we clearly took many steps backward with regard to usability. When Win 3.1 and especially 95 were developed, a lot of focus and testing was done on usability because it was expected that a lot of people wouldn't know how to use a GUI. Concepts of 'this is a button, you move the mouse pointer over it and you can click it' would be novel to a lot of users. All the signifiers had to be on point and consistent. All of that has gone out the window. I blame 1) Mac OS X, because it was pretty it made classic Windows UI look ancient and obsolete and 2) smart phones with UIs so opaque that apps often include little tutorials showing you how to use the UI, basically giving up on trying to be intuitive.

553 points by maxmouchet 8y ago

Most of these were from Windows 95. They got some slight cosmetic improvements in 98 and then again for 2000 if I remember correctly.

bluedino 8y ago
The big change was in Windows 9x the icons were 16-color, unless you had a 16-bit color display (even 256 color graphics cards used 16 color icons because of palette swapping between applications). https://imgur.com/GpS5Dln https://imgur.com/GpS5Dln

asaph 8y ago

Meh. They look very dated to me.

StavrosK 8y ago
That's because they're from 1995... The point of the article was that they represent great design, not that they look current 25 years later.
- asaph 8y ago
  Great design stands the test of time. e.g. TrueType fonts from that era are still used today. (Actually the designs of many of those fonts are substantially older than their TrueType implementations.) These icons haven't aged well IMO. They looked cheesy back in the day and they still do today.
  - asaph 8y ago
    Microsoft was never regarded as a force in graphic design. That was more of Apple's wheelhouse.
    - msla 8y ago
      And Apple logos and icons look cheesy, too.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      To be fair, early OS X hadn't aged well at all either, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time.
      - anthk 8y ago
        OSX Tiger is ideal. Modern-ish, colourful and huge clicky widgets.
satysin 8y ago
Age does not stop something from being great. The Matrix is 20 years old this year, it is dated, it is still awesome.
- asaph 8y ago
  That's not what "dated" means in this context. It means the artifact is stuck in its time period and not well suited for the modern era. So if the Matrix is still awesome, then it's not dated.
- implements 8y ago
  The matrix is a simulation of the past (the late 90s) - which is a great film idea because it means even the presence of deep CRT monitors doesn't date the movie - unlike (say) in "Alien", where they do (imo).
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I don't know, the whole aesthetic of the Alien universe is so coherent and well thought out that they don't really stand out to me.

azhenley 8y ago

I'm sure we will go full circle back to that style soon enough, but with higher resolution and expanded color palette.

tobr 8y ago
I think the small palette is a big part of the charm. It’s limited enough to give the whole set a coherent look, but large enough to illustrate any kind of object.

yzb 8y ago

You should've linked to the https version of the page so the dozens of icons load faster (because of http2 multiplexing) https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/ https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/

linux2647 8y ago

I also think the aesthetic of classic Mac OS, like versions 8 and 9, as well as BeOS had great design that made it easy to know what widgets were what and how to interact with them.

duskwuff 8y ago
Yes! The "Platinum" aesthetic in classic Mac OS was great. Simple aesthetic, easy to follow for custom UI elements. Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

talkyroom 8y ago

Totally agree with you

amiga-workbench 8y ago

Windows 2000 was just about the peak of desktop interfaces from a usability and efficiency standpoint, its really only missing out on window snapping and workspaces (which is kinda a crutch for bad window management like on OSX)

veridies 8y ago

While they may have been good for the time, it’s pretty hard to distinguish a lot of these while looking at my smartphone, especially when I’m not wearing glasses.

timbit42 8y ago
Back then people had 640x480 screens.

raphlinus 8y ago

You might want to consider adding "image-rendering: pixelated" to your CSS; on a high-dpi monitor, these render with bilinear interpolation, which I think doesn't do justice to the crispness of these icons.

zozbot123 8y ago
Agreed, though with this sort of pixel art you really want either Lanczos, or some palette-based scaling like hq#x. That way you will preserve the "crisp", high-frequency content in the original image as much as possible while not introducing artifacts like a "blocky" appearance (instead, the result is smooth but crisp, like a watercolor painting). (In fact, I wish modern desktop environments did this automatically on HiDPI screens while keeping the original pixel art as their source-- especially for its improved usability on lower-res displays, which are still widely used, both on desktop and mobile. Instead we tend to get SVG, which while extremely crisp on high-res displays is a mess for the original 16x16 or 32x32 use case.)
- tomc1985 8y ago
  What is the problem with 'blocky' appearance? All of those filters produce icons in their own aesthetic. If the point is to preserve their pixellation when why bother with filters?
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > If the point is to preserve their pixellation The "point" of pixel art-- what makes it so convenient for graphicians, even amateur ones-- is not the blocky appearance (what you call "pixelated" - but in fact these icons did not appear "blocky" on the CRT screens that were in common use at the time!), but to set a uniform constraint on fine detail (and sometimes color depth) within the image, and then to maximize quality while staying within that constraint. It is perfectly consistent to want a means of rendering these images that preserves whatever level of detail was in the original while not introducing blocky artifacts.
    - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

untog 8y ago

By the criteria outlined in the article I would have thought the Windows 95 icons would be the ideal - they're essentially the same but without the "flashy" gradients and other depth indications. Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now that's the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.

agumonkey 8y ago
the gradients have just enough aesthetics IMO kinda like NT5 fading.. it added a bit of information but without distraction nor cost (unlike today UX)
drivers99 8y ago
Later in the thread they determined the virus detection was a false positive.

bepvte 8y ago

I tried very hard using bash scripting and some recursive archive extraction stuff to get all the icons out... but I couldnt get all the names, and I got a lot of false positives. Id be interested to know how the author did this.

laurentdc 8y ago

I feel like older user interfaces treated me like an adult. Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around. I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/ [1] http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png [2] https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.576210/ https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.57621...

fermienrico 8y ago
Early OS X [2] in no way looks like a "workstation" UI. It looks like an interface for a toy. Solaris [1] UI certainly does though!
untog 8y ago
Early OS X looked like a weird candyland to me. Not as lurid as XP, sure, but the 3D-like glassy buttons and the sliding animation as you minimised something always struck me as kind of overkill.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  When Jobs first showed off the Aqua UI, he was pretty excited about the æsthetics and what Quartz could do. There were also many practical things shown, but…
  - bitwize 8y ago
    "I want to lick it!"
- protomyth 8y ago
  It was quite the shock coming to OS X from NeXTSTEP. I actually ran with NeXTSTEP icons on OS X for a lot of years until they made it super hard with SIP.
- 8y ago

jenscow 8y ago

Amazingly, moricons.dll is still included with Windows 10. This contains icons from Windows 3.0. (it should be called "moreicons.dll", but this was from when filenames had to be 8 + 3 characters long)

jackfraser 8y ago
I felt so cool in Grade 5 when I found that file. I had discovered that EXEs could contain icons, and then found some 3rd party program that loaded one from a DLL, so I went opening random DLLs until I saw that filename. What a rush! Where were all those programs? I found out many, but some were still a mystery. This was part of whatever that Win3.1 thing was that would scan your disk for programs it recognized and add them to Program Manager, right?

Gikoskos 8y ago

I love the early Windows design, especially the Windows 2000 look. Other than the well designed icons, I find it to be much more intuitive and consistent than modern Windows GUIs and Metro. Part of the reason why I use the classic style on my Windows 7 machine (the other part is better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/ https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/ Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.

andai 8y ago
I can relate. What are your plans for when W7 support is ended?
- Gikoskos 8y ago
  No plans yet but I guess I'd have to adapt. Do you know of any ways to get that look on 8.1 or 10 natively? At least without having to install a third-party theming app.
  - andai 8y ago
    I think this is the best you can do https://www.howtogeek.com/133405/how-to-get-classic-style-themes-back-on-windows-8/ https://www.howtogeek.com/133405/how-to-get-classic-style-th...

orliesaurus 8y ago

Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don't remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague/friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.

lb1lf 8y ago
I showed my son (age nine) a floppy disk a couple of months ago. His immediate comment? "Wow, a 3d-printed save icon!" Sigh.
- Hurtak 8y ago
  Is this actually happening to lots of parents/kids or is this joke that lots of people copy from each other? https://www.google.com/search?q=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+icon!&oq=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+icon!&aqs=chrome..69i57.927j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+ico...
  - lb1lf 8y ago
    Quite possibly both? I can definitely see where my son is coming from, as he's only seen floppies once in his life, whereas even his Nintendo Switch uses a floppy to indicate that it is saving his progress. Must be baffling. I hadn't felt as old as I did then since I bumped into the first kid who didn't know what a landline was. ("Imagine a cellphone with no battery, so you needed to keep it plugged in at all times...")
    - aasasd 8y ago
      > who didn't know what a landline was I feel like you've been had another time. At least I keep hoping that kids see plenty of those in older movies.
  - 8y ago

_pmf_ 8y ago

BeOS is peak UI design for me. I'm actually working with Haiku OS sometimes to feel this vibe.

ajmarsh 8y ago
I 100% agree. The BeOS icon set remains my personal favorite to this day. When I run Linux I usually load them up first thing. https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos

faissaloo 8y ago

I wish we could get a modern spin on this style

alsadi 8y ago

I miss redhat's bluecurve icons. https://www.deviantart.com/redrope/art/Bluecurve-Complete-Icons-1831078 https://www.deviantart.com/redrope/art/Bluecurve-Complete-Ic...

jackfraser 8y ago
Yeah, these are excellent. Very BeOS feeling.
- AckSyn 8y ago
  Oh man, I miss BeOS. It was one of the two OS's I'd bought back in the day. The other was OpenBSD 3 iirc I have the CD around here somewhere, too.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    I loved the BeOS icons. Spent a lot of time forcing Windows NT 4 to look like it.
neotek 8y ago
Oh man, nostalgia wave right there! One of the first things I would do when setting up a new Windows machine was to install that icon pack!

simplecomplex 8y ago

Who was the designer? What’s the license/copyright situation?

ChrisSD 8y ago
That's what I came here to ask. I'd be pleasantly surprised if MS decide to allow redistribution.

thanatropism 8y ago

I wish there was a comparison with Windows 95 icons.

altmind 8y ago

I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.

zozbot123 8y ago
The "remove color from all the toolbar icons" thing also happened with Firefox Quantum. And you're right, it's so weird. Perhaps it's a side effect of the ongoing transition to ubiquitous "big", touch-friendly buttons, where a combination of large size and full color would be overly distracting.
- int_19h 8y ago
  The idea is to increase the contrast between content and chrome, by making chrome itself less visually contrasting. I don't buy into it, though. They tried monochrome grey icons in Visual Studio 2012, and people hated it, for good reasons. So now VS icons have colors again.
lozenge 8y ago
That's funny, they tried this with a beta of Visual Studio 2013 as well, and rolled it back. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx?WT.mc_id=-blog-scottha http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/intr... (the hilarious original annoucement) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNewVisualStudioLookAndFeel.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNew... (commentary) https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide/suggestions/3184305-bring-back-full-color-icons-to-visual-studio-2012 https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... (a rollback) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/ux-guidelines/images-and-icons-for-visual-studio?view=vs-2017#BKMK_UsingColorInImages https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/... (Visual Studio 2017 icon color pallette and guidelines)
- jenscow 8y ago

tempodox 8y ago

Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.

combatentropy 8y ago
I remember that noise. I blame Microsoft more than the hardware. From 1984 to about 1994, Macintoshes were my main computer, and they didn't make noise just for moving the mouse or opening a menu. Later, I ran Ubuntu on a computer that used to run Windows XP. The noise and latency that Windows had, just for opening a menu or folder, were replaced by silence and instant action. (Just to be clear, of course all three had to spin the hard drive when I did something major, like opening a file or program. But Windows is the only one where all interactions were erratic.)
- tempodox 8y ago
  I agree that it wasn't due to the hardware. It's just that today's hardware has gotten so fast that even Microsoft products seem to run almost smoothly.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  And in fact, you still get that noise and activity light on Windows 10 and a spinning-rust HD! On a system that wouldn't even manage to use the RAM completely while running on a sensible Linux install, let alone filling RAM up or swapping to disk. I mean, swapping used to be a fact of life in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even on Linux - RAM was just too cramped back then. But then we got machines with lots and lots of RAM even at the low end, and Linux became snappy and quiet-- while Windows is still as bad as ever.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    This — constant swapping — is what drove me to Linux. Though, the laptop I am typing this on is still using 16/32 GiB of RAM, mostly due to the "modern" web. (But that's not any operating system's fault.) RAM is, I feel, one of the more precious commodities on a machine, still. I have spinning rust in my machines (more space/$), and I've not regretted it, or really had a need for the speed an SSD could bring. (If anything, I think I'd do a hybrid install, with a small SSD and a large HDD.) But I've never once regretted upgrading RAM on a machine, and I definitely miss it on my work MBP.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

I prefer the Windows 95 icons, e.g. http://windows95tips.com/post/35587792563 http://windows95tips.com/post/35587792563

spronkey 8y ago
Oh Windows 95... the last MS OS to feel completely uniform in aesthetic design. And that teal... gets me every time. I used to think it was hideously ugly, but these days there's an understated elegance to it that just can't be denied.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  [My comment was really a thinly-veiled excuse to link to windows95tips.com. I don't actually have any aesthetic preferences between the icons/design of different versions of Windows.]

alxlaz 8y ago

Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had: - Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless - Good contrast - Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch-enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else. - Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use. The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate... I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you need to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!

rsync 8y ago
"Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent." Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work. One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  What makes up for this, to some extent, is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in OSX: go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click +, select the application (or all applications), type the menu name and set a shortcut.

golem14 8y ago

I found the original Mac, or the DR GEM icons (e.g. on Atari ST) even more utilitarian (could one call them 'brutalist' ?) and may I say 'pleasant'. In that vein, sometimes I wish for a desktop that is grayscale except for exceptional highlights (e.g., photos, warnings, ...). I remember that it was a real pleasure to use the Atari SM124 B&W CRT monitor.

atombender 8y ago

While I don't agree with the article's notion about icons, I think it's true that 1990s UIs, especially Windows and Mac, were particularly productive OSes because they applied not just common UI idioms but standard interactions: Buttons, menus, windows, drag and drop -- everything was largely consistent between each app. With the web, we had a lot of consistency for a while simply because browsers didn't allow much customization. Initially, all links were underlined, and form buttons had to look exactly like the browser presented them. But then CSS happened and all bets were off. Underlining is largely gone as a UI idiom. It's no longer evident if something is a link or button, whether you can right click and do "open in new tab" (often not possible if the link is not a URL but a JavaScript function), and so on. A "native" app like Slack is all over the place in terms of UI consistency, compared the strictness of the old IBM CUA standard and others. One may be productive within a single app, but not all of the idioms translate to other apps. I think we're in a transitional phase where we're halfway between old-style GUIs and something more fluid that approximates real life to a greater degree. Consider the "UI" of a kitchen appliance or the packaging of a new iPhone, or a TV remote control, or just a plain old door. Everyday objects vary wildly in what "idiom" is provided to the user. Some doors have a handle, some have a knob, some have a bar you push. We have the same kind of annoying lack of standards and consistency in the real world, though it's usually evident that you can turn a know and push down on a handle. One can imagine a future where UIs are gesture-based, for example. Think of the 3D UI from Spielberg's Minority Report. Some of these UIs may need to offer completely new way of interacting with objects (grab and make a fist to copy, open your hand wide to paste, or something) that will be difficult to standardize, much like the real world.

dsego 8y ago
FYI, these idioms you talk about are called "signifiers", which are signs indicating what you can do.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  There’s a book that talks about these things called The Design of Everyday Things. I’ve only read parts of it myself but a friend of mine read the whole book and said it was good. From the parts I’ve read I agree. The author has some given some talks and presentations relating to UX as well that can be found on YouTube. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyd... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman

chris_wot 8y ago

The Windows 98 interface was actually not bad. There only issue I had was that to stop the computer you click on Start. :-)

samfisher83 8y ago

I think windows 95/98 interface was great. I don't want ads when I click on the start button. All they needed was to add a search bar and call it a day instead all these ads or apps you don't want.

thothamon 8y ago

No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.

jammygit 8y ago

The icons are nice, but I've never known what 90% of them were supposed to represent. Still can only guess at many of them. I do like the depth though

paulgerhardt 8y ago

There’s a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. 15 years is about half a fashion cycle so you see the goods in their least flattering light. Today that would roughly correspond to looking at Windows Mobile CE interfaces or OSX Panther/Safari 1.0. Anything older and it starts coming back into fashion. The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ a couple of years ago and now this seems to confirm a trend. Certainly so, if you thrown in some art projects like Windows ‘93, recent fashion and music trends around vaporwave and reinterest in PC-9800 emulation. Love it.

anthk 8y ago
>There’s a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. Everyone is copying the typefaces and color schemes from the magazines which came in the 70's. >The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ Most of the kids with the ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ meme didn't even use Windows 98 or be even aware of computers. I remember w9x not as a fashion trend, but as a shitty os with a nightmare to manage in order to not crashing while intalling a driver. Installing games took ages, and viruses were a real thing. Also, everything was shareware. Libre software and Linux/BSD were not known outside academics except at very late 90's. If they knew and be alive into that, they woudn't be so fake nostalgical.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I was alive into all this, and I find it very nostalgic.

gumby 8y ago

From the article: > Rather than some designer’s flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. They had hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols. The change is deliberate and reflects a social shift. In the W98 days computers were primarily seen as work devices, and in particular Windows wanted to distinguish itself from the more playful feeling Mac (which itself chose a more playful feel to address the fear most people felt about their computers. Apple tried to repeat the Mac playful feeling with the iMac and early OS X feel, and while it helped a bit in the consumer market it reinforced that feeling that they weren't for actual work. And though it feels like it, this relationship hasn't changed! The (often forced) playful feeling of modern UIs comes from the phone and the phone was able to succeed there -- even need it -- because 1> people were already comfortable with a non-professional connection to the web, mail, messaging et al and 2> it was a "phone", not a "computer". This didn't worry Nokia or Microsoft at first because they had "professional" devices, and probably we forget the days of carrying a work and personal phone for phone calling. But then since the work phones were so crappy they were able to capture the mindshare. I think it's gone the wrong way: because phones are worth so much, much less effort goes into designing "work" apps, and the designers all start mobile -> web -> desktop.

tengbretson 8y ago

The fact that the article has nearly no content besides "these are cool" and the comments on it say the download has a virus in it makes me very dubious.

tambourine_man 8y ago

Sorry, as a Mac user then and now, they still look as cheesy as they did back then to me. Not that Windows looks nice these days either.

kevindong 8y ago

I hate the frequently excessive usage of icons in modern UIs. In icon-heavy UIs, the meaning/functionality of an icon isn't very clear and labels only show up when you hover a mouse over the icon (you're usually out of luck if you're on mobile).

godot 8y ago

I think nostalgia plays a part for sure, but there's also substance about the old UIs. Looking at Win98 icons reminds me of my days in high school when I would just tinker around Windows for fun, changing icons of shortcuts, make good ol' personal homepages in HTML and Javascript (mostly alert boxes), and play Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2. The icons and the Win98 UI give me pleasant feelings, mostly coming from those experiences. On the substance side -- this isn't exactly about Windows, but in the last couple of years I've tried a variety of Linux distros and DEs. Specifically, I've tried CentOS 7 KDE, Antergos Gnome 3, and Manjaro 18 KDE, all on laptops. There's no doubt that both Antergos and Manjaro bring with them very modern DEs (regardless of Gnome or KDE). But for some reasons, I felt the most productive on the CentOS 7 KDE, even though it looks the most primitive. Before I had the Manjaro laptop, I thought it was a KDE vs Gnome difference (KDE being more similar to Windows, vs Gnome being more similar to macOS, and I generally prefer Windows), but I think it actually does come down to the UI design. CentOS 7's KDE looks very dated, but everything is very functional and took little customization to feel productive in. The difference is similar to Win98/2000 vs Win7/8/10.

vermaden 8y ago

Windows ME/2000 icons were even better. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png

soheil 8y ago

There has been a shift towards UI that gets out of the way and becomes second nature to us. Admittedly that dream hasn't yet fully been realized, but we are on that path. Removing clutter, HDD led light, noiseless computers all imo try to integrate computers ever more fully into our lives and make it as seamless as an integration as possible. One day we may have UI that feels so natural that we might just think of a computer as one of our organs.

alexfringes 8y ago

In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that’s frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum. So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even. Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work. Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.

anthk 8y ago

They irony is that the icons are the opposite to the font colors. Please: https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/

anthk 8y ago

Ok, follow your tip. Look those nice w9x icons? do the same with your fonts. https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/

ggm 8y ago

The designers were a very well coordinated integrated group (if there was more than one of them) and they took design imperatives of a restricted palette and fixed pixel sizes to heart. If you asked the same group to design this now in a world of high dpi high gamut screens they might not get the same constraints out in their design brief. Google's work on flat responsive was in some ways running against the tide. Skuomorphic was hardly ancient when the Google reaction happened

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

regression test failed

openloop 8y ago

imo not really.

canthonytucci 8y ago

great from the same site, possibly nsfw https://alexmeub.com/projects/celery-man/ https://alexmeub.com/projects/celery-man/

michaelaiello 8y ago

Classic Shell helps bring us back to this design. http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/

peterburkimsher 8y ago

I collected 131,788 icons from that era as 32x32 PNG files, and made a simple search program for them. Does anyone have good ideas for using this dataset? https://iconpush.github.io https://iconpush.github.io

the-great-assyr 8y ago

No they are not. Simply no! Wanna some really good and useful icons? Go get them at KDE. Those... Things sucks. Big. Time. Is that some hipster phoney nostalgia article of some sort? Please...

techcarving 8y ago

Yes, no doubt.

jimbo234 8y ago

but where are the emojis

thiht 8y ago

Wow, this entire thread is so weird to read! I find these icons really bad compared to what exists on Windows 10 for example, and yet everyone seems to agree that 98's icons are better! I mean, seeing the icons in the illustration, I have no idea what 3 out of the 6 do. In the image at the bottom of the article it's even worse I'm pretty sure it's just nostalgia, I have no idea why everyone here seems to think they're objectively better

bromuro 8y ago
I don’t miss at all those playful icons while using one of the worst windows ever. I hated that mix of Tahoma and MSSansSerif too.

kup0 8y ago

Interesting to see how much current design has affected my gut reaction. At first my mind immediately went to "there's no way this is the case..." But looking at Win98 icons and UI... I really do miss that interface. Contrast and buttons actually being buttons... etc I think (despite my use of Win10 and MacOS for various reasons) that's why I have a love of Linux UIs... many of them hearken back to those days. The Linux DEs I tend to gravitate to are the ones that are most like classic Windows UI

kstenerud 8y ago

I miss Windows 2000. 3.11 and earlier were utter garbage. I was on an Amiga, and so thankfully avoided those steaming piles. 95, 98, and ME were brutal operating systems, crashing all the time, corrupting data, and generally making life hell. There was an NT 3.51 mod that would give it the win95 interface, but there were too many software compatibility issues. Amiga was dead, so I switched to Red Hat. Then came Windows 2000. A nice, clean interface. Speedy operating system. Real memory protection. Most things were in sane places. It got out of your way and let you get real work done. When XP came out, I didn't really see the point. It had graphics that looked like a candy bar and slowed things down enormously. Thankfully, you could disable it. I'm still not sure what they actually improved in that operating system to make actual, real work easier to perform, but whatever they did, it took twice the memory to do it, and required a beefier processor. Then came Vista, which was unbearably slow. I upgraded to XP during this time because my software wouldn't run on 2000 anymore. Windows 7: A New Hope. It was still slow, but it turned out to be not an unbearable upgrade, although I still stuck to XP for as long as I could. Windows 8: Bigger. Slower. Unfathomable. I stuck to 7 through gritted teeth. Now we're at Windows 10. Schizoid is the best word I can use to describe it. Horrible UI half in the Vista world, half in the mobile world, Duplication everywhere, no clear path for getting things done, constant updates at inconvenient times (you can't seem to get even a month of uptime with this OS). I've since switched to Ubuntu, and run my Windows software in Wine.

zozbot123 8y ago
Broadly agreed, except that I find even Ubuntu to be quite slow these days. Sticking to plain vanilla Debian with a lightweight interface solves this quite nicely - XFCE and LXDE are incredibly snappy even on very low end hardware, quite a bit better than XP at least.
chaoticmass 8y ago
I remember Windows 2000 feeling like the height of Windows UI. Changed the gray color theme to a oh so slightly brownish gray which just seemed classy. That oh so subtle drop shadow on your mouse and other UI elements. Retaining all of the psuedo-3D box rendering for windows, buttons, borders, etc. Helpful and consistent signifiers revealing UI functionality at a glance. Then the new-wave of UI designers decided all of this was 'ugly' and needed to be cleaned up. Maybe the new stuff is 'prettier' (subjective) but we clearly took many steps backward with regard to usability. When Win 3.1 and especially 95 were developed, a lot of focus and testing was done on usability because it was expected that a lot of people wouldn't know how to use a GUI. Concepts of 'this is a button, you move the mouse pointer over it and you can click it' would be novel to a lot of users. All the signifiers had to be on point and consistent. All of that has gone out the window. I blame 1) Mac OS X, because it was pretty it made classic Windows UI look ancient and obsolete and 2) smart phones with UIs so opaque that apps often include little tutorials showing you how to use the UI, basically giving up on trying to be intuitive.