3 ms·

I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even trying to get anything meaningful d

I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is. But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind, not something you have to fight all the damn time. Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one, is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button? Is it a text input? You never know!

tambourine_man 4y ago
It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any intrinsic merit, I'm sure. Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.
Joeri 4y ago
The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.
- grishka 4y ago
  Doesn't a "14-inch" CRT monitor have a smaller viewable area? I remember LGR saying that at least. So, 800x600 at 13" yields 76.92 dpi. The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27 dpi. My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x. That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78 dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on that screen from my usual viewing distance. And yes there is an issue with some Windows laptop manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too small with default settings, and thus designers designing those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.

tambourine_man 4y ago

It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any intrinsic merit, I'm sure. Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.

Joeri 4y ago

The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.

grishka 4y ago
Doesn't a "14-inch" CRT monitor have a smaller viewable area? I remember LGR saying that at least. So, 800x600 at 13" yields 76.92 dpi. The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27 dpi. My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x. That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78 dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on that screen from my usual viewing distance. And yes there is an issue with some Windows laptop manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too small with default settings, and thus designers designing those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.