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Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people. It's fascinating because: - It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The Men
by hyakosm 6y ago
Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people. It's fascinating because:
- It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The Menu/Toolbar couple, scrollbars with a relative size, 3D buttons, start menu, toolbar...
- The gap between Windows 3.1 (1992) and Windows 95 is insane.
- It was beautifully coherent. Today, Windows 10 seems like a mess with different UI pieces from different universes: Modern UI, Windows Vista/7 era utilities, Windows XP/2003 config things and some older gems. Fun thing: open a Word document from a pendrive and unplug the pendrive, MS Word will show an error box from Win95 era, asking to insert the floppy in the drive.
- When booting a VM or an old computer with classic Windows I feel "at home". Our first family computer when I was a child was a Pentium II / Windows 98. I have strong reflexes with this kind of UI and I'm faster with classic window and menus compared to my phone or a tablet with modern touch interface.
- flowerlad 6y ago> It was beautifully coherent. And that's because it copied heavily from NeXTSTEP of the late 1980's. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... That beveled look was invented by Steve Jobs's team, and copied by Microsoft. I would much rather use NeXTSTEP look & feel than Windows 10 or even OS X.
- core-questions 6y agoI want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.
- Lammy 6y ago> It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops. And doesn't even look (too) dated when paired with a compositor: https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png If Wayland could just give me this I'd switch to it in a heartbeat, versus possibly-never :(
- feanaro 6y agoWhat is so special about NeXTSTEP and WindowMaker? I see it often brought up and I actually used WindowMaker briefly at some point in the past, but I don't "get it". Could someone explain?
- phire 6y agoIt's besides the point where the ui style came from; It was coherent because it used the same ui patterns and styles everywhere. But your enthusiasm for NeXTSTEP really makes me think of this Steve Jobs anecdote: https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1374934903188414467 https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1374934903188414467
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hyakosm 6y agoNextStep was awesome but the computers were high-end expensive workstations. Windows 95 works on a 486 without FPU.
- flowerlad 6y agoCheck out the hardware info in this screenshot: https://infinitediaries.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/NeXTStep-Screenshot.png https://infinitediaries.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/NeXTS...
- madflame991 6y agoYou don't need an fpu at all to draw those bezels do you?!
- Tagbert 6y agoNo, but the Nextstep UI was generated with PostScript, so lots of floating point and rasterizing. It basically treated the screen like a PDF.
- fsiefken 6y agoexactly. it would be a bit anachronistic but you could conceivably run NeXTSTEP on a 486 without a FPU right now https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
- bitwize 6y ago"High end expensive workstations" with 25-MHz 680x0 processors. OpenStep ran on a 486 without FPU.
- pjmlp 6y agoFeel free to contribute to GNUStep. :)
- thendrill 6y agoI can't belive no has yet mentioned Litestep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep It was my favorite ui replacement on Win98/95 until Win2k come out.
- hestefisk 6y agoI remember Litestep. It was very good. You would edit the wm config using notepad and then do hot reload. Unheard of in the Windows world.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agoThat looks like AmigaOS in higher resolution?
- datavirtue 6y agoI remember seeing the early peeks at Windows NT in Byte magazine. Jaw dropped. Reading about features had me drooling over the future. It was similar to Win 3.1 at the time but with a much more serious look. As a pre-teen I was obsessed with the asthetic and the idea of having a multi-user security model and built in networking. This was during a time when you had to buy expensive products like Lantastic (hardware and software) to have a network in your small business.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoSome are still going for this kind of "physical" look : https://factorio.com/ https://factorio.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jhallenworld 6y agoI fired up my Windows 3.11 recently- one thing I had forgotten about is that there is no right-click to get to icon properties, instead there is only Alt-Enter.
- chemmail 6y agoI always install Classic start on all my systems no matter if its just testing for 5minutes, or anybody's computer to make life easier for me and them.
- fsiefken 6y agoYou say the gap between Win3.1 and Win95 is insane. I don't agree with that. Before I was able to run Win95 I used Calmira with Windows 3.11 - it provided a nice Wind95 like taskbar. There was also win32s to run most 32bit applications. Yes the multitasking was better on Win95, in Win3.11 I had to wait until a floppy disk was formatted before I could do something else. I totally agree I feel at home with the 98 classic and XP classic UI's. It's a pitty I can't run modern browsers and java on XP, otherwise I'd be tempted to use it. There are some themes for Linux though, perhaps the Xplorer2 runs under wine. I could use ReactOS as well.
- techrat 6y agoI recently revived an old laptop that was sold for scrap, it was fully working... just missing a power adapter. Dos 6.22 and Win3.11. Much more usable than I remembered. Was kinda sorta able to get online with a PCMCIA Ethernet card. Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless... The UI was very straightforward even then. Open folder. Click icon to run app. It wasn't hard to use. Like you say, the bigger issue was the amount of power we had under the hood. Task switching wasn't perfect but it didn't exactly hurt us then, either. I realised that for as long as I have had a Windows system (all the way up through to my Win10 box though I now prefer xUbuntu)... I always did something that is kind of a holdover from my days of using Win3.0... Instead of using the start menu, I put shortcuts to all of my mostl commonly used apps in a folder called 'Proggy Bin' on the desktop so I can alt-tab to it when I needed to instead of dragging my mouse to the corner. So, in some ways, the old Win3.x UI was more productive in my workflow.
- dawnerd 6y agoThere’s been some projects that try to get the new internet working on old computers. One off the top of my head: https://github.com/atauenis/webone https://github.com/atauenis/webone Also saw one recently that proxies to archive.org for that really nostalgic feel.
- t90fan 6y ago> Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless... Use a proxy running on your LAN. The proxy connects to the site over modern HTTPS (i.e. TLS 1.2 or whatever) and you connect to the proxy over plain HTTP, or whatever old version of HTTPS your client supports (NT4 sp6 with IE6 supports TLS1.0 or SSL3, as the latest, dunno about win 98), if you make sure to trust its cert.
- asddubs 6y agothe partition manager on windows 10 is even more unchanged from the 95/98 days than the example given in the article. it seems to literally still be the exact same interface
- usrusr 6y agoThat's a holdout from the configuration UI style introduced in Windows 2000, not 95/98 (unless it was already there in NT 4, or unless we aren't talking about the same thing are all) 2000 reigns as the pinnacle of Windows UI consistency in my perception, but that particular management UI style was a first hint at future deviations, it was an outlier even then (I think it's because it's a family of UI built to interact with a separate system service, potentially remote?)
- hestefisk 6y agoThe Windows 10 partition manager (Disk Manager) stems from Windows NT / 2K. Windows 95 / 98 only had fdisk.exe, which was horrendous.
- 2ion 6y agoI do not really understand how Microsoft could drop the ball that low on Windows 10 usability. It feels like a cramp to make something different but without any foundational insights how it could be better than past iterations on the UI nor with the budget and man power actually needed to pull the project together. Putting all other things aside, the "Windows shell" today is so much inferior to even latest GNOME and KDE iterations. On the other hand, what's changed massively is how easily Windows 10 can be used as a power user, single-user desktop computer from the shell through powershell. I do not even have to rely on bad or outdated click UIs --- although my employer recently sent me to a AWS course where the task was to configure a Windows Server based AD controller, and the experience involved admin GUIs from my worst nightmares --- to do things like checking the current IP addresses, configuring and overriding DNS servers, or definining/scheduling custom background services anymore. While other parts and usage paradigms of the Windows computer are experiencing a boost and are being "supported" right now, esp. when it comes to developer tools and developer workflows, package management (winget...) --- thank you Microsoft for that vision ---, the "classic way of using Windows" and the use of good UI to make the OS accessible to users of all PC user skill levels is being neglected to such a degree it's not even funny.
- epanchin 6y agoMicrosoft didn't just drop the ball on the general design. Individual features have fallen behind. The calculator in Windows 7 was great, you could type sums and edit your history to quickly make changes to calculations. Windows 10, history is just for looking at. I now have a Texas calculator on my desk.
- andrepd 6y agoQalculate is by far the best calculator app I've ever used.
- cosmodisk 6y agoI don't think I've seen a single person in any office using the calc on windows- anyone who needs to do simple calculations more than once a day has a physical calc on their desk- so much better and easier to use.
- herbst 6y ago> It has established strong foundations about Windows UI. The Menu/Toolbar couple, scrollbars with a relative size, 3D buttons, start menu, toolbar... Or maybe windows just never progressed. If you see how much linux desktops changed over this period. Windows today just looks like a fancy clone of 95, always has.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agoWhich is as it should be. Backward compatibility and 'stability' (maybe familiarity/recognizability would be better words) are far more important than random changes/experiments that are the core features of Linux desktops.
- herbst 6y agoSo not replacing the win95 menus but just adding more and more on top speaks for stability? Familarity is more relavant than a work focused workflow? I dont really get that sentiment, how many win95 programms do actually still work without issues?
- grishka 6y agoI recently ran Mac OS 9 on an emulator, out of curiosity, after having been using modern macOS/OS X/whatever you call it for the last 10 years. Now, to set the context, I'm Russian, and back when classic Mac OS was current, Apple computers were generally stuff of legends. "Insanely expensive beautifully made things, very good with colors and fonts, that professional designers sometimes use and most people can't afford". Macs only started gaining popularity around the very end of 00s — probably not least because of the Intel transition and the ability to try out the OS as hackintosh. Anyway. It was interesting to see how it evolved. There definitely are familiar elements and patterns, but it's... different. There's no dock. You can't minimize windows. The menu bar is there, but the item with the current app name is to the right and it's an app switcher; what is now in that item, is under File, so you do File -> Quit. There are no status/tray icons in the menu bar, they're instead in a separate bar at the bottom left. There are desktop shortcuts to programs, something that feels Windows-only to me because no one does that in the modern macOS. Files don't have extensions, but instead rely heavily on extended attributes in the file system to remember what type the file is and what program it opens in. There's some third-party software installed with the system, and craploads more bundled on the installation CD for you to install manually. Inclusion of third-party software with the OS felt very un-Apple to me. And, the most perplexing thing, there's no support for scroll wheel and right mouse button! I understand that Macs of the time came with single-button mice, but c'mon.
- yakz 6y agoIt wasn't so much evolved from OS 9 as copied; macOS is an evolution of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, not the classic OS.
- grishka 6y agoOf course the internals are entirely different, I meant UI/UX evolution.
- monocasa 6y agoYeah, the UI/UX arguably evolved more from Next than OS9. Jobs wasn't going to embrace the UX of the company that stagnated with him gone for a decade. Even at launch of OSX the old Carbon based applications felt behind the times compared to the rest of the OS.
- sigg3 6y ago>It was beautifully coherent. Not really. While Linux DEs had open in place, Windows would keep opening new Windows when clicking a folder. Until the UI crashed. I believe the NT line had open in-place. That's besides the point though. The same list of actions would randomly BSOD in one case and not the other. Windows 95 was not coherent it was chaotic. You only had 4 hours left on the 0day FtP WaReZ site? Tough luck. Deadline at work? Too bad. With Win95 randomly crashing and corrupting files whether you'd get there or not depended on Russian roulette kind of luck.
- Delk 6y agoFolders opening "in place" was a deliberate design choice called spatial file management or so [1]. It has its downsides and IIRC I wasn't a huge fan, but I wouldn't call it incoherent. I don't think anybody misses Windows 95 in terms of technological quality, but there was actual deliberate and well-researched design behind its UI. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager
- jcpham2 6y agoI still use win9x .cpl and .msc shortcuts for everything. Win 10 UI be damned.
- cosmodisk 6y agoYou are right, it's been 25 years and what we have today is nowhere near better. Windows 95 was consistent, there were very few UI surprises compared to almost every single version that followed after it. Frankly I don't even know how people learn how to use computers nowadays, if someone like me, who used computers for most of their lives+ use them professionally for living, struggle on daily basis.
- shp0ngle 6y agoIt was not THAT coherent. The UI sometimes took weird turn to 3.11 design or even DOS But in general you are right
- megous 6y ago> Windows 95 is probably the oldest OS easily usable by young people. I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were using it just fine. You learned some dual pane commander, how to navigate/copy dirs/files around on floppies, a:, c:, what files are runnable and you could run and share games and programs. It was not that incoherent either. Norton/Volkov/M602 commander was the main interface, had popup menus for most functions (so everything was quite discoverable), and the rest was just about running random executables you got from someone on a floppy. There was barely any multitasking. At most you got to run some resident programs (mouse driver or various cheats for games :)). It was conceptually simpler than what you get these days. And having a file manager as a primary interface kind of invited you to explore what's on your computer. People who still like to use two pane file managers probably come from those days. :)
- Bluecobra 6y ago> I grew up in DOS days, and a lot of kids back then were using it just fine. My first PC when I was a kid came with Win95, but all the good games were still on DOS. Some games like Ultima VII had their own extended memory system and was a pain to get working right, especially on a newer PC running Win95. It took a lot of trial and error to get the right boot disk/config.sys to get the game to work. It was like a game in itself. Needless to say, I got DOS-savvy pretty quickly since playing cool games was my motivation.
- oceliker 6y agoI thought they meant "oldest OS easily usable by young people of today", but I might be wrong.
- megous 6y agoYes, I understood that. I just assume that young people today are no different from young people 25 years ago, other than maybe having the (dis)advantage of preexisting knowledge of today's computing. Which may be the parent's point, I guess?
- 6y ago
- city41 6y agoI've always felt Windows 2000 was the pinnacle (or perhaps XP with the classic theme turned on). So consistent and clean. The emphasis back then was a computer is a tool you use, not something that needs to be "pretty".
- sixothree 6y agoWindows 2000 was such a surprise. The "look" was not vastly improved from 98se, but for a power user it was clearly a better OS. Everyone I met who had tried Windows 2000 a similar reaction - this is really good stuff. I feel like Win 2k was "underappreciated" because of that surprise, but also to the point of the author. The visual design was not a huge improvement over previous editions. I'm sure it didn't "feel" like an upgrade.
- Sharlin 6y agoWell, it was the first Windows based on the NT kernel that found its way to consumers' computers. Well, at least the computers of enthusiasts and power users – as far as Microsoft was concerned, the 2000 was still meant for workstations and servers and did not have a "Home" edition. For home use there was the much-maligned Windows ME which ended up being the last non-NT, not-memory-protected, still-sorta-just-a-fancy-shell-over-DOS Windows that Microsoft released. Only with XP did Microsoft completely unify their "home" and "professional" lines.
- city41 6y agoI felt like for 2000 they took the 98 look and just nicely honed it. Things like the gradient in the title bar of windows, or switching from the default aqua of 98 to the nice blue of 2000. Little things that pushed this overall look and feel to a nice sheen. I do remember back in the day the name was confusing, up till that point all DOS based Windows had a year name, and all NT based windows were, well, called NT :) I remember people being surprised to find out 2000 was an NT based Windows.
- mostlysimilar 6y agoI completely agree. Windows 2000 (classic theme in XP and later) was the best Windows has ever looked. The foundation was already fantastic and it had extensive customization options. I still long for the Rainy Day theme. I wish Windows 10 would allow us to use the classic shell.
- bernardv 6y agoAgree with the state of UX and UI’s these days. Younger developers are missing out on the UI design standards which worked very well and were introduced back in the late 90’s with Win95 as well as Windows Forms (in Visual Studio). There used to be a Microsoft UI best-practices/standards document which most developers actually followed, resulting in predictable interfaces which did not force users to have to guess their way around (to be fair Apple did a better job maintaining their UI standards I think). No matter the framework flavor of the day, web technologies make for sub-standard user interfaces. Win95 was a big step from Windows 3.1x. Being a Microsoft Windows support tech at the time, supporting both the older Windows 3.1x and new Windows 95, it made for many lengthy support calls. It definitely took a while for the new look & feel to catch on.
- OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago> It definitely took a while for the new look & feel to catch on. Interesting. What sorts of things did people struggle with?
- starpilot 6y agoWhat's a pendrive?