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> I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and

> I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and you’re in my teenage passion years! Although I had the same feeling of “this is the future” when I saw a demonstration of the original Mac in 1984. But I just remember thinking, “no color?”

jandrese 5y ago
Steve Jobs had a bug up his butt about machines that could play games being "toys for kids" and he did everything he could to have the Mac treated like a "serious business" machine, part of that included sticking with boring corporate monochrome graphics. I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples. The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I was never an Amiga guy. I remember seeing one at an acquaintances house and being bothered by the bad "iconography". In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor. That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI. For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real? I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.
- lproven 5y ago
  It is one of those things, yes. Not just an "everyone's tastes are different", which of course they are... but sometimes I see GUIs and think "yikes, how can you bear to look at that all day?" For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant. GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/ https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good. As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 When the Amiga got a bit more mature and more people used monitors, AmigaOS 2.x got a slightly more toned-down blues-and-greys palette. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.

jandrese 5y ago

Steve Jobs had a bug up his butt about machines that could play games being "toys for kids" and he did everything he could to have the Mac treated like a "serious business" machine, part of that included sticking with boring corporate monochrome graphics. I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples. The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I was never an Amiga guy. I remember seeing one at an acquaintances house and being bothered by the bad "iconography". In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor. That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI. For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real? I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.

lproven 5y ago
It is one of those things, yes. Not just an "everyone's tastes are different", which of course they are... but sometimes I see GUIs and think "yikes, how can you bear to look at that all day?" For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant. GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/ https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good. As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 When the Amiga got a bit more mature and more people used monitors, AmigaOS 2.x got a slightly more toned-down blues-and-greys palette. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.