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Retro nostalgia and why my new website looks like Window 9x (2019)
- xuhu 6y agoI wonder why icons and GUI elements look weird when scaled (I have 125% scaling enabled in Windows 10) whereas Windows 95 screenshot images look perfect in the same browser (Chrome). The website seems to use images for Close, Minimize, Maximize icons so it's probably not a scaling issue.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoIt is a scaling issue. image-rendering: crisp-edges;
- sdwvit 6y agoThis blog is fun to poke around. There is a bug with time tho, it says 0:25 pm for me instead of 12:25pm
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yoz-y 6y agoWhile an interesting experiment. It does break a lot of web stuff. E.g.: - Middle clicking on a "blog post" text file opens new tab, but without the post opened. - Middle clicking on the date of a blog posts, opens a literal html transcription of the page (wrong mime?) - In general, I don't need another window manager, the system and the browser handle that fine.
- ripper1138 6y agoIt’s supposed to be fun! Stop and smell the roses. Who cares if middle click doesn’t work.
- dehrmann 6y agoReminds me a little of when Meebo came out and people were blown away seeing a windowed UI in a browser.
- alamortsubite 6y agoAnd Desktop.com, about five years before that.
- dehrmann 6y agoHeh. "Windows Me." Punny.
- hirundo 6y agoIs there a kind of nostalgia that isn't retro?
- neom 6y agoNostalgia is a feeling and in this context, retro is a style. In the sense that they both refer to the past, maybe. Here to be nostalgic is to opine in the present about the retro style. However generally speaking, one could have a feeling of nostalgia towards a smell, feeling, colour, moment etc, nostalgia does not have to be retro(style), unless retro is specifically retroactive, and that isn't the case here.
- coldtea 6y agoA few pine for lost futures.
- hirundo 6y agoThose are retro futures.
- coldtea 6y agoYeah, like the "60s version of the future", but not always. You can feel nostalgia for novel, just invented, futures too (in the sense of feeling a loss for not being able to go there).
- rbanffy 6y agoWe were promised vacations on the Moon, space stations, and rocket belts. All that while keeping the simple life of the period. What we got is a dystopian nightmare that could have been written by Charlie Stross (I know you lurk here) or William Gibson, except that the dialogues and plot are destitute of any interesting feature.
- TedShiller 6y agoNice try ;)
- tomc1985 6y agoProps to this dude for actually getting most of the details right. Though I don't think the font is correct. A lot of folks try to do 'retro' but they screw it up by getting key details wrong... maybe the simple bezels have the wrong light angle, maybe the colors are too high a bit depth, and so on. A lot of games mix pixel sizes or use free rotation without quantizing it to the pixel grid (especially annoying!) If you're going to take the retro route, don't cheap out on the details. Do it all the way or don't bother. Bravo
- jolmg 6y ago> If you're going to take the retro route, don't cheap out on the details. Do it all the way or don't bother. That's quite passionate of you. I like how the OP added their own things. It's quite creative. For example, Paint has multiple themes, rendering of the undo history as a GIF, and multi-language support. I don't remember Windows 98's Paint having any of that, and it's all awesome.
- tomc1985 6y agoThat's cool. I did a bit more poking around and found a few more inaccuracies, but they are not really visible from the surface so it's cool. (Namely... there's an Access Denied dialog box that uses forward slashes when it should be using backslashes for a path)
- KMnO4 6y agoI don’t think he made paint. It’s from https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/
- Macuyiko 6y ago> A lot of games mix pixel sizes or use free rotation without quantizing it to the pixel grid So happy I am not the only one with this pet peeve. Never understood why so called retro games simply not render at a higher resolution backbuffer and then scale it down to a low-res one.
- tomc1985 6y ago
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThis is relevant to my interests...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- imperialdrive 6y agoThis site loads and looks wonderfully on my mobile device. Kinda incredible how natural the interface feels.
- aftabh 6y agoFor some reason, I had to close the website quickly after browsing for a little while. For a moment it felt like I'm looking and going through someone personal desktop (which has been left unlocked) without their consent while at the same time I was really well-aware that it's just a personal website for public. Weird feeling :) Edit: On second thought, it looks like it did one thing really well is refreshing my own personal memory of Windows 9x (personally, I've good memory of Windows 98, before I switched to Linux based desktop -- Ubuntu specifically).
- mgraczyk 6y agoReally love the look and responsive feel. Also pretty easy to find content (blogs on desktop, games in start menu, etc). One odd thing I noticed, when I navigate "back" to your site after clicking a link, sometimes the page renders HTML as text. For example. I somehow ended up on this page which just shows the page's HTML for me https://ash.ms/html5-canvas https://ash.ms/html5-canvas The content-type in the response is text/plain
- reggegg 6y agoCool, have you looked into getting the original Windows fonts in there as well (title bar, start menu etc)? Helvetica I think?
- frosted-flakes 6y agoWindows used Tahoma as the system font from 95 to XP. Vista-onwards used Segoe UI.
- rbanffy 6y agoWe do anti-aliasing much better now.
- f430 6y agohttps://soundcloud.com/montaime/mtss-204 https://soundcloud.com/montaime/mtss-204 i love this song that started playing
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoGood song. But it reminds me of the 80s rather than the 90s.
- f430 6y agoyeah has that sweet melodramatic progression. wonder what kind of genre or sound this is called saounds a bit like los amigos invisibles
- Lammy 6y agoThe author also released a lot of these UI components as an ISC-licensed Preact library: https://github.com/AshKyd/ui95 https://github.com/AshKyd/ui95
- njharman 6y agoWasn't slow enough and didn't crash / not feeling the nostalgia.
- rodolphoarruda 6y agoLOL. You know, I was just expecting that to happen. But then, everything was running so smoothly with zero load times. I clicked the media player and it popped-up already loaded with a dozen videos on it. This alone, back in the day, would be something like: click-and-go-fix-your-lunch kind of experience.
- bscphil 6y agoIn Firefox, I don't see an article, I just get a pop up error message: > ServiceWorker script at https://ash.ms/sw.js https://ash.ms/sw.js for scope https://ash.ms/ https://ash.ms/ threw an exception during script evaluation. Edit: seems like it was uMatrix doing something, although the log didn't show anything blocked except googletagmanager.
- Izkata 6y agoWell if it makes you feel better, I did find a bug: Go Start -> Shutdown, then click "Cancel" instead of the "X", and it remains in the taskbar without a window.
- ryantgtg 6y agoIt crashed for me. The images weren’t loading on a blog post, so I chose “turn off content blockers” on my mobile Safari browser, and the page reloaded showing only raw source code. Turning content blockers back on didn’t fix it. Revisiting the site now gives the same result. Very weird! I was half way through an article, too. Maybe I should reboot my phone.
- Keyframe 6y agoEven though we're eons ahead in tech, especially mobile, 90's seem to have peaked a lot of ideas which we slowly iterated upon ever since. Not as many leaps since, or any, outside of mobile.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoI think “being ahead in tech” can mean two things: we’ve refined and improved iteratively in things like reliability, distributed computing and processor tech but, I don’t think we’ve really had a real novelty since the rise of the iPhone.
- Keyframe 6y agoThat's what I meant. Seems like, well the feeling is that, there was this cambrian explosion of ideas that were just then possible to be materialized due to tech finally being able to, well materialize them into that cambrian explosion. Right now I cannot think of much / any tech outside of real of possibility with tech we have. Take VR as an example, which is still not there, it was there in the 90's. Crude and various approaches, but there. Since, we had iPhone/mobile and ML recently. I cannot think of other seemingly leaps. I might be wrong, of course, since it's all based on a feeling.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoI agree, although I don't know that ML is actually a "leap": my general impression is that a certain subset of "AI" techniques became practical because of GPU advances, which lead to an explosion of practical applications: the technique itself isn't particularly new, afaict.
- GartzenDeHaes 6y agoCheck out the 1970's https://youtu.be/uknEhXyZgsg?t=1166 https://youtu.be/uknEhXyZgsg?t=1166
- Keyframe 6y ago
- rbanffy 6y agoI miss the persistence of the phosphor and the simple elegance of the pre-PC fonts. I miss the cadenced hum of the teletypes, that 10 Hz suspense between silence and the racket of the type element hitting paper. When using Windows 95, I realized I was living inside what would have been science fiction for most of my life. This is really solid work (kudos, Ash), but I'm an older audience who pines for a different past.
- anthk 6y agoInstall unifont, set it up to 32px. As for the terminal, use anything.
- rbanffy 6y agoUnifont is nice, but still won't give me a beam spring keyboard and a nice green high-persistence phosphor.
- hyakosm 6y agoWith a RaspberryPi, a serial interface and a real VT terminal you can still do a lot of things!
- rbanffy 6y agoOne project I really want to build is an Apple II card that allows a Pi (or something similar) to use the II's keyboard and screen as a virtual console. Ideally, one would boot the Apple II, type a "PR #1" to initialize the card's firmware and boot the Pi with the II as a console. A terminal would have better fonts (the II has a 7x8 matrix) but would be limited to what the terminal's serial could do.
- cblconfederate 6y agoI recently removed all animations from my android and the zero latency blows me away, it's like it got instantly way faster. Wish i could do that for the web Most of the sins of the modern web can be easily undone
- unicornporn 6y agoJust disabled, how lovely!
- deergomoo 6y ago> Wish i could do that for the web I would imagine something like `* { transition: none !important; animation: none !important; }` would get you pretty far right?
- userbinator 6y ago...in a browser that supports user stylesheets, which unfortunately means only Firefox and IE, by default. It's possible to work around that with extensions, however.
- amilios 6y agoChrome has tons of extensions that do this, letting you do it on a per-site basis too. I use one to enforce a "dark mode" on HN actually!
- jsmith99 6y agoFor the web, if you have the right accessibility settings in your operating system or browser, then the prefers-reduced-motion media query should tell sites not to show you animations. Not many developers explicitly add support for this, but it's included in eg bootstrap. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
- Keyframe 6y agoThanks for the tip. Night and day difference!
- ponytech 6y agoAnyone knows the framework used to build such a website? I had been looking for this and the closest I could found is https://www.os-js.org https://www.os-js.org
- ponytech 6y agoAfter looking at the source, I found the answer: https://github.com/AshKyd/ui95 https://github.com/AshKyd/ui95
- jancsika 6y agoIs there an HTML5 "make my cursor be good" library? Because when I do stuff like this, it looks so appealing to just declare a cursor in a CSS rule. Then HTML5 is all like: * ha ha. There's a default set somewhere else in the DOM that's overriding your cursor (as in the author's website where the titlebar triggers the text edition cursor). * ha ha. I'll show your desired cursor for the DOM element, but when you drag the element with the mouse I'm going to flicker every time the mouse beats Javascript to a location that lies outside that element's bbox. Especially when making a UI to drag SVG rects, this gets annoying. I doubt there's a pseudo class for "this thing I am dragging right now using a mousemove event listener," but maybe I'm wrong.
- jaflo 6y agoThe approach I have seen is to apply the cursor you want to the entire body using JS so even if your cursor momentarily escapes the element the wanted cursor is shown. You just need to make sure to revert back to the default cursor when the users stops dragging or the window loses focus.
- jancsika 6y agoThanks, jaflo. I use the JS body approach, but I was hoping I was missing a declarative option. Even JS has the PointerEvent so that you can encapsulate behaviors like dragging inside a single DOM element without having to set state for a parent element like body. I was hoping CSS had something analogous (though I can't currently think of how it would work).
- layer8 6y agoThe referenced Progressbar95 game is hilarious (and deeply nostalgic): https://youtu.be/aTM8wxMIIx8 https://youtu.be/aTM8wxMIIx8
- klyrs 6y agoThat is pretty great, but I'm rather partial to Progress Quest... http://progressquest.com/ http://progressquest.com/
- vmception 6y agoI’ve run into a lot of people that mistake retro nostalgia for out of touch and out of date design. I’ve heard half a dozen people say curve.fi has a problem for them because of the geocities-like site design curve.fi one of the most respected and used application in its sector It is confusing to use because of the interface, but its design is very intentional and is obviously retro nostalgia but as far as dropping funds into it or not, the site design is completely benign in that decision making just something to be aware of that there are a lot of older people who don't know stuff they are familiar with is retro enough to be nostalgic now
- scyclow 6y agoI'm not sure I agree, but a lot of people classify my work under the retro nostalgia umbrella. Personally, I'd prefer to classify it as neo-retro nostalgia. http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz https://ronamerch.co https://ronamerch.co
- lecarore 6y agoI was following along on fast cash money plus, at which point do you tell users to stop and that it is a scam ? I mean, it's kinda clear, but do you let them go all the way ?
- scyclow 6y agoThey can go as far as they want. I think I've made it difficult enough for people to follow along that if they actually get to the end then they're discerning enough to know what they're doing.
- fortran77 6y agowindows 95 was not "built on top of MS-DOS". I don't know where this lie started. It was built from the ground up as a 32-bit native operating system.
- userbinator 6y agoYour second sentence is the lie. It's actually a hypervisor that runs MS-DOS VMs, and thus quite close to Win3.x in enhanced mode, but the "system VM" is mostly still 16-bit code. See the series of books by Andrew Schulman for details.
- wvenable 6y agoWindows 95 booted into DOS first, loaded any DOS device drivers in CONFIG.SYS and then automatically ran WIN.COM to launch the Windows 95 shell. At that point the system dropped into protected mode and was 32bit native operating system. However there was still 16bit DOS code and 16bit Windows code running. Windows 95 could easily be thought of as a very advanced DOS application. I disagree with the author when he says "we didn't know better". Windows 95, as it was designed, was necessary. It had to be able to run on the hardware (and with the drivers) of machines at the time and run existing DOS and Windows 3.1 software.
- hnlmorg 6y ago> Windows 95 could easily be thought of as a very advanced DOS application. "Easily"...perhaps, but not accurately. It would be like arguing that Linux is a very advanced GRUB application or that DOS was a very advanced BIOS application. The fact remains that while DOS was an essential component for bootstrapping Windows 9x, Windows did still manage it's own memory, resources, etc independently of DOS. Sure, Windows managed it's memory in a way that was sympathetic of DOS applications (basically using DOS layouts wholesale for 16bit applications) but that was a requirement of the era. But you see similar examples of standards being used as a based (for compatibility) and then expanded upon in the Linux/UNIX world with Linux and macOS having POSIX components but support for so much more added on top. > I disagree with the author when he says "we didn't know better" I disagree with the author there to but for very different reasons than you. In the 90s we already had OS/2 (who's DOS emulation was so sophisticated that it could run Windows 3.1). Not to mention a whole boat load of better home computers than IBM-clones, such as Acorn Archimedes, Apple Mac, Atari ST, Amigas (funny how they all begin with 'A'). By the late 90s there was BeOS too. Windows 9x always felt like the shittiest desktop offering to pretty much anyone who'd used pretty much any other computer that wasn't an IBM-clone. So yeah, some of us did know better. But that didn't stop the IBM/Microsoft partnership from monopolising the desktop market. :( Windows 2000 was the first (and, frankly, only) time I ever felt impressed by a Microsoft OS. Then they went and ruining it with all the bling in XP (for those who weren't aware, the first release of XP was basically just a skinned version of Windows 2000 but which required literally twice the system resources to run. It wasn't until somewhere around service pack 2 or 3 before XP became the platform that everyone identifies with these days).
- Dort 6y agoI just found the following to style HN like Windows 95: https://github.com/chowderman/Hacker95 https://github.com/chowderman/Hacker95
- uncomputation 6y agoSeems like a staple for any frontend-focused person to redo their portfolio/personal site/blog in a Windows OS for aesthetic reasons. Luckily most grow out of it within a year or so
- amilios 6y agoCouple of behavioral tweaks could make it more authentic -- for example when dragging windows I believe the default behavior was to show the only the outline in the new position, not the window contents as it's being moved -- I may be mistaken though
- cloudking 6y agoWhen we moved from 3.x to 9x , the start menu was such a beautifully simple way to access everything. Now it's a bloated mess but still kind of works.
- temporallobe 6y agoI just spent the last 5 minutes playing Road Blocks.
- xwdv 6y agoTry elevating user privileges for some cool Easter eggs!
- smusamashah 6y agohttps://simone.computer/#/webdesktops https://simone.computer/#/webdesktops List of other mostly retro desktops like this
- apatheticonion 6y agoI miss running Windows 7 with the classic UI theme and no animations. Windows 7 was the best.
- jumaro 6y agoI really like his implementation of spider solitaire. Such details really make a difference.