5 ms·

Btw those text based interfaces are better than most gui/web interfaces of today.

miohtama 5y ago
Windows 95 was the peak of good UX, like the ancient Greek was the peak of statue crafting. Some things were better in the past.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I kind of agree. I think that while it's getting a little bit bloated that xfce4 still pushes the right buttons for a gui for me. Simple, lots of good shortcuts by default, nice simple launcher, and you can tweak til your heart's content (but I don't really anymore). I love xfce4 combined with the whiskers launcher, it does what I need.
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
- rahoulb 5y ago
  Personally I'd say MacOS 9 was the peak (ignoring its instability). Things like: * the filesystem root being the desktop - so you started navigation from the first thing you saw when you switched the computer on * the way the finder remembered the exact layout of your folder windows (if you've not experienced it, it's hard to explain why it's better - but Windows Explorer and the current Mac Finder are both file browsers, whereas the old Mac Finder *was* your desktop in whatever state you left it) * kernel extensions being switched on and off by dragging them in and out of the extensions folder These things made the GUI match the actual underlying system - whereas I always felt that Windows 95 onwards (and now OSX/macOS) hide the workings under pretty layers). Having said that I also used Turbo Vision in the olden days and it was fantastic.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Windows 95 was unreliable, NT Workstation 4.0 was better.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Well obviously, we're talking about the GUI aspect of it, not the underlying OS. Win95 ran on what was essentially DOS so of course it was unstable compared to a modern (at the time) properly jailed off userland/kernel OS like NT
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Pre-internet windows 95 was fine, as long as your hardware was good. A lot of folks had off-brand CPUs with bad cooling, off-brand RAM with problems, etc. which lead to a lot of instability. But on a plain old Intel pentium with good RAM Windows 95 would run forever. It was a hermetically sealed little environment--there were no updates or changes unless you popped a floppy disk in and made them. If you didn't do anything different it would boot up the next day just like it did the days prior. It wasn't until we started getting those machines on the internet regularly and started running a lot more background tasks, services, new software, etc. that they really started to degrade.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      49.7 days are forever?
      - qbasic_forever 5y ago
        Before the internet was on 24/7 with broadband connections everywhere people didn't run their PC all the time. It's not like you had a local wifi network to serve data, etc. to your other devices. You turned the PC on, played a game, did some spreadsheets, dialed in to AOL, and then turned it off. Those PCs pulled 300+ watts of power at idle too and were huge power hogs. Running your windows 95 PC nonstop for days and months at a time was not common at all.
        LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. At the times W95 was usual, I mostly ran NetBSD and later some Gentoo and Debian on my assorted systems. Furthermore, most systems had PSUs rated at 200 to 250 Watt, which they didn't even burn if one used operating systems which knew what to do with the CPUs HLT instruction during idle, or less load, also spinning down disks was a thing. BTW, there was software which made W95/98 use HLT too. Rain, Waterfall, CPUidle, or something like that. Which became obsolete with W2000 which did that by itself. Shrug.
protomyth 5y ago
The accountants where I work felt all the GUI interfaces sucked compared to their terminal. This led us to buy a new iSeries. It will probably last the same 15 years as the last one.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I remember one place I worked where we ripped out all of the dumb terminals on a UNIX system and replaced them with Windows 3.1 PC's with terminal emulation. Productivity was noticeably down after the change.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Productivity was noticeably down after the change. Can't play much Solitaire or Minesweeper on a UNIX dumb terminal... The most fun you can have is flying around in a 3D-rendered filesystem.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      MUDs say hello.
    - pajko 5y ago
      "It's a UNIX system! I know this!"
    - toast0 5y ago
      80x24 is plenty of room for solitaire, and an ok minesweeper (bigger is nice though) If you've got a graphical terminal, like you'd need for your filesystem viewer, then you can do all sorts of stuff, of course.
- bluedino 5y ago
  They're faster than web based apps that's for sure.
  - protomyth 5y ago
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Definitely not as good as the web, if only for zero accessibility. With the web you have a DOM of semantic elements that are all carefully marked up by hand to describe the intent and meaning of everything. With turbo vision and TUIs you have a buffer of bytes with text, graphics, background, etc. all using the same character set. Good luck if you're a screen reader trying to make sense of it. But you can have TUI style on the web, this tui.css project is absolutely amazing IMHO: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Windows 95 was the peak of good UX, like the ancient Greek was the peak of statue crafting. Some things were better in the past.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I kind of agree. I think that while it's getting a little bit bloated that xfce4 still pushes the right buttons for a gui for me. Simple, lots of good shortcuts by default, nice simple launcher, and you can tweak til your heart's content (but I don't really anymore). I love xfce4 combined with the whiskers launcher, it does what I need.
toiletfuneral 5y ago
rahoulb 5y ago
Personally I'd say MacOS 9 was the peak (ignoring its instability). Things like: * the filesystem root being the desktop - so you started navigation from the first thing you saw when you switched the computer on * the way the finder remembered the exact layout of your folder windows (if you've not experienced it, it's hard to explain why it's better - but Windows Explorer and the current Mac Finder are both file browsers, whereas the old Mac Finder *was* your desktop in whatever state you left it) * kernel extensions being switched on and off by dragging them in and out of the extensions folder These things made the GUI match the actual underlying system - whereas I always felt that Windows 95 onwards (and now OSX/macOS) hide the workings under pretty layers). Having said that I also used Turbo Vision in the olden days and it was fantastic.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Windows 95 was unreliable, NT Workstation 4.0 was better.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Well obviously, we're talking about the GUI aspect of it, not the underlying OS. Win95 ran on what was essentially DOS so of course it was unstable compared to a modern (at the time) properly jailed off userland/kernel OS like NT
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Pre-internet windows 95 was fine, as long as your hardware was good. A lot of folks had off-brand CPUs with bad cooling, off-brand RAM with problems, etc. which lead to a lot of instability. But on a plain old Intel pentium with good RAM Windows 95 would run forever. It was a hermetically sealed little environment--there were no updates or changes unless you popped a floppy disk in and made them. If you didn't do anything different it would boot up the next day just like it did the days prior. It wasn't until we started getting those machines on the internet regularly and started running a lot more background tasks, services, new software, etc. that they really started to degrade.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    49.7 days are forever?
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      Before the internet was on 24/7 with broadband connections everywhere people didn't run their PC all the time. It's not like you had a local wifi network to serve data, etc. to your other devices. You turned the PC on, played a game, did some spreadsheets, dialed in to AOL, and then turned it off. Those PCs pulled 300+ watts of power at idle too and were huge power hogs. Running your windows 95 PC nonstop for days and months at a time was not common at all.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. At the times W95 was usual, I mostly ran NetBSD and later some Gentoo and Debian on my assorted systems. Furthermore, most systems had PSUs rated at 200 to 250 Watt, which they didn't even burn if one used operating systems which knew what to do with the CPUs HLT instruction during idle, or less load, also spinning down disks was a thing. BTW, there was software which made W95/98 use HLT too. Rain, Waterfall, CPUidle, or something like that. Which became obsolete with W2000 which did that by itself. Shrug.

protomyth 5y ago

The accountants where I work felt all the GUI interfaces sucked compared to their terminal. This led us to buy a new iSeries. It will probably last the same 15 years as the last one.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I remember one place I worked where we ripped out all of the dumb terminals on a UNIX system and replaced them with Windows 3.1 PC's with terminal emulation. Productivity was noticeably down after the change.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Productivity was noticeably down after the change. Can't play much Solitaire or Minesweeper on a UNIX dumb terminal... The most fun you can have is flying around in a 3D-rendered filesystem.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    MUDs say hello.
  - pajko 5y ago
    "It's a UNIX system! I know this!"
  - toast0 5y ago
    80x24 is plenty of room for solitaire, and an ok minesweeper (bigger is nice though) If you've got a graphical terminal, like you'd need for your filesystem viewer, then you can do all sorts of stuff, of course.
bluedino 5y ago
They're faster than web based apps that's for sure.
- protomyth 5y ago

qbasic_forever 5y ago

Definitely not as good as the web, if only for zero accessibility. With the web you have a DOM of semantic elements that are all carefully marked up by hand to describe the intent and meaning of everything. With turbo vision and TUIs you have a buffer of bytes with text, graphics, background, etc. all using the same character set. Good luck if you're a screen reader trying to make sense of it. But you can have TUI style on the web, this tui.css project is absolutely amazing IMHO: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]