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It didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever animated li
by asveikau 7y ago
It didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever animated like this either.
- toyg 7y agoUh, not in 93, but around 98/2000 definitely it looked like this. Well, without the animated windows effects. (I’m looking at v1 only, on mobile at the moment)
- anticensor 7y agoWindows 93 is what became Windows 95.
- roelschroeven 7y agoNah, I don't think so, Windows 95 was codenamed Chicago before it was released. I can't remember ever having seen the name "Windows 93" mentioned in that time.
- chungy 7y agoYou wouldn't have. It was still being called "Windows 4.0" until very close to its release in 1995.
- anticensor 7y agoSee The Old New Thing, by Raymond Chen: https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC , where he says "Windows 95 was originally Windows 93, after all."
- roelschroeven 7y agoYou're right, apparently, and I was wrong. Wikipedia says so too: > So the development of Windows "Chicago" was started and, as it was planned for a late 1993 release, became known as Windows 93 which was also known as Windows 4.0.
- asveikau 7y agoSource? I thought they had some design ideas in a later cancelled OS called Cairo, then they had a release codenamed Chicago which ported some ideas but dramatically scaled back, and that was Win95.
- fcbrooklyn 7y agoAt the time there were two branches, the win 3.1 branch, which was consumery, and the NT branch which was for servers / developers, etc. Cairo was an OS based on the NT branch, which was ultimately cancelled. Chicago was the project name for win95, which came off the 3.1 branch. Eventually the NT/3.1 branches merged, in the release called XP. And yeah, there's no such thing as windows 93. Source: worked at msft from 92-97.
- asveikau 7y agoBut I thought the Chicago UI was also present in some form in cairo, and that is where some of it originated. Is that true? I know the history of NT based windows much better, I was at MS later, and in Windows.
- fcbrooklyn 7y agoThere may have been some overlap, but as I remember it the main thrust of Cairo wasn't really about UI. It was an object based filesystem, and some other fancy shit going on under the covers. (I was on Apps, and we never targetted Cairo, never got a chance to play with it directly, but I saw it demoed a few times, and I remember the UI looking more like NT/3.11. Could easily be misremembering that part though) EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia: "The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."
- numpad0 7y agoWow, never thought of 98/98SE as 4.x point releases, or Me as 5.0, or XP Home and Pro as descendant SKUs for 3.1 and NT 3.1.
- LocalH 7y agoTo counter the downvotes from people who are certain there was no “Win93”, here are two internal MSFT emails referring to the same, in clear reference to what ended up being Win95. http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX01263.pdf http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX0... http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX01308.pdf http://www.windowswiki.info/wp-content/uploads/codenames/PX0...
- jdofaz 7y agoI remember people talking about Windows 97 before 1998 rolled around.
- hluska 7y agoYou’re right about 93, but if you go about five years later and keep all the animations turned on, it looked a lot like this. Those animations killed performance so I suspect that most people on here turned them off as quickly as I did, but this is a pretty good reproduction. It’s good enough that as I poke around, I remember specific events from my relative youth...
- laumars 7y agoAnimated windows weren't a thing even in the late 90s. That required a compositing window manager. Linux was one of the first platforms to get them and Compiz wasn't even released until the mid 00s. Vista was the first MS operating system to properly support compositing (though XP -- and 2000 via undocumented APIs -- did support transparency effects). Animated icons have never existed aside from hacks like Active Desktop or active running programs in system tray / taskbar (again, using hacks where the icon was changed every second).
- int_19h 7y agoI'm pretty sure the API that changed the window transparency was documented in 2K, because I distinctly remember reading how to do it on MSDN after first seeing one of those in an app.
- laumars 7y agoIt was documented in Windows XP but I think it was Vista that really promoted the use of that effect ("Aero" was it?). Happy to be proved wrong about Windows 2000 but I don't recall seeing any documentation on MSDN back when I was playing around with Windows APIs. I remember I pinched the API guide for XP thinking "if it works in XP then it must work in Windows 2000" and the reason I remember that so vividly was because it didn't work properly. In fact it caused a kernel panic. Which was pretty much the only time I managed to upset Windows 2000 badly enough to cause a "blue screen of death".
- int_19h 7y ago
- sn_master 7y ago"nothing ever animated like this" Active Desktop... I had one of those were almost every single icon on the desktop was animated, even "My Computer".
- asveikau 7y agoIt did not make win32 windows animate when they opened or closed. Edit: multiple people mentioned windowblinds. I used it too in the late 90s. My point stands.
- nitrogen 7y agoThere were third party addons that did some pretty crazy things. I don't know if animations were among them, but I do remember at least one that would completely retheme windows with different shapes and layouts, Windowblinds I think it was called.
- sn_master 7y agoyup! I used it until Windows XP, before Vista made it kind of pointless.
- qplex 7y agoThanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then. I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...). I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe. I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done. Here are some screenshots: [0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg [1] http://litestep.net/snapshot1.png http://litestep.net/snapshot1.png
- Izkata 7y ago> I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done. Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.
- arexxbifs 7y agoThe nice thing about running Linux is that my FVWM config looks pretty much the same now as it did in 1995, bitmapped fonts and all. Can't improve on perfection.
- asveikau 7y agoI recently started using fvwm again on one machine in some kind of exercise in nostalgia. Holds up surprisingly well.
- dghughes 7y agoIn the 90s I used FVWM on Red Hat v1 and it was confusing to me. It's like looking at your desktop through high-powered binoculars from two feet away.
- asveikau 7y agoIt was a very configurable window manager, so I am sure with some study you could have adjusted the distance of the binoculars.
- anthk 7y agoI think he run it under a VirtualDeskop mode, where its physical screen would be smaller than the X11 video mode, thus, having to scroll up and down to show the full Fvwm Pages.
- asveikau 7y agoThanks, I had forgotten that mode, but I remember it now. In those days as I recall setting X to work at a good resolution was sometimes much more painful than it had to be. Since the 2000s (after the fork to Xorg for example) autoconfig got a lot better. I seem to recall it was possible to trigger a config that would give you a very low physical resolution but high res virtual desktop.
- dspillett 7y ago> nothing ever animated like this either There were add-ons that added animated tricks to the window manager even back in the Win3.1 days. Nothing like you get with more modern GPU-based compositing techniques as everything had to be done in software and CPUs were not all that fast, but you could get animated icons, windows that slid or faded into view, and other such. It was slow and jerky, even on what was high-end kit at the time, but that didn't stop people playing. Running such software was a first class way to bring on a blue-screen, or in "standard mode" just hang everything, of course!
- core-questions 7y agoMy brother could crash Windows 3.1 in Standard Mode just by mashing the keyboard in some particular way that I could never reproduce. Never took more than 10-15s of elbows on keys before we got a BSOD on an otherwise stable machine.
- wastholm 7y agoA few years ago I let my young son examine a keyboard connected to a Linux computer with a locked screen and in a few seconds he showed me my first kernel panic. I never figured out how he did it.
- ajuc 7y agoprobably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
- WorldPeas 7y agoCompletely unrelated, but you just brought back some wonderful memories of the elementary school computer lab when all the students would mash the shift key when they wanted help, so when the whole class got stuck, there would be a chorus of motherboard buzzers. Good times.