4 ms·

The design of the GUIs were one of the reasons I got interested in two of the exotic beasts of the 1990s OS wars: BeOS and NeXT. BeOS was a deliberately “vapou

by qubex 6y ago

The design of the GUIs were one of the reasons I got interested in two of the exotic beasts of the 1990s OS wars: BeOS and NeXT. BeOS was a deliberately “vapourwave chiselled look with 90s cartoon icons” that screamed F.R.E.N.D.S and Melrose Place and edgy or avant-garde typography in nineties magazines. NeXT on the other hand was austere, alabaster, eminently workable, but... so regular, so regular, so well thought-out, so utterly restrained and so internally consistent. Those were wonderful GUIs. They had no pretence of disappearing into the background. They had to be clear signage for generations educated in the age of text-mode (and sometimes even still coming from the tail-end of the “typographic age”).

anthk 6y ago
More like vaporwave, 90's were industrial and office design: something to make you feel productive. No 00's kid would understand this, we did. BeOS was a mix between the potential MS Office killer and the multimedia machine capabilities from the late 90's. No cyberpunk, no friends, no avant-garde. Just a boring office cubicle + multimedia production for artists. No, not for vaporwave music. Any music. Techno, classical, R&B, metal... anything. That, and video/image editing. The late 90's screamed "workplace", "multimedia" and the information exchange era. Brutalist and futurism. OFC Helvetica was mimicked from press, the media and press were HUGE back in the day, they had the same power as MS, Amazon, FB, Google and Netflix today. So we tried to clone magazines, VCRs, TV's, cubicles and stereos/radios in our computers. We succeeded. Trying to explain the 90's with "vaporwave" is ridiculous. Those could be maybe for the early 90's demoscene for PC/Amiga. They were as obsolete in late 90's as Windows 98 today. The late 90's were about replicating the mainstream media in your computer.

by qubex 6y ago

anthk 6y ago

More like vaporwave, 90's were industrial and office design: something to make you feel productive. No 00's kid would understand this, we did. BeOS was a mix between the potential MS Office killer and the multimedia machine capabilities from the late 90's. No cyberpunk, no friends, no avant-garde. Just a boring office cubicle + multimedia production for artists. No, not for vaporwave music. Any music. Techno, classical, R&B, metal... anything. That, and video/image editing. The late 90's screamed "workplace", "multimedia" and the information exchange era. Brutalist and futurism. OFC Helvetica was mimicked from press, the media and press were HUGE back in the day, they had the same power as MS, Amazon, FB, Google and Netflix today. So we tried to clone magazines, VCRs, TV's, cubicles and stereos/radios in our computers. We succeeded. Trying to explain the 90's with "vaporwave" is ridiculous. Those could be maybe for the early 90's demoscene for PC/Amiga. They were as obsolete in late 90's as Windows 98 today. The late 90's were about replicating the mainstream media in your computer.