5 ms·

Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots

215 points by zdw 3y ago

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Ahh, my first workplace had a MicroVAX II and some SPARCstation 2s with a special place in my heart. We ran Ultrix/Motif and SunOS/OpenWindows, so these arcane screenies of MicroVMS, SunTools, and Display PostScript are educational for me. The MicroVax was sort of the secondary, older system but it intrigued me, and I hacked on it, securing some career advancement along the way. I'd already saved our reputation and revenue bigtime by overhauling our authentication server. When word got around that I'd reconfigured the Ultrix kernel to my liking, I feared a reprimand but received a promotion to sysadmin and a 33% raise. The SparcStation 2 was the jewel of the office and its printer was the bane of my existence. There was a storage pedestal and a SPARC Laser printer; this system was in a triple role as a desktop workstation, office print server, and customer/public Internet services of whatever sort existed before WWW. Now the SPARC Printer used Display Postscript as its engine, and that's why I'm ranting about it here on this article. Display Postscript-based printers are like WinModems: they're essentially dumb devices, and IIUC, they appear somewhat like a monitor to the host system. So the Postscript engine runs on the host and then zaps rendered pages out to the device. This is great in theory, and it's great in practice if you've got a dedicated print server and your printer never jams or fouls physically. Well guess what. We were heavy users on that thing, because everyone in the United States was phoning us asking how to get on the Internet, and we offered a free guide for that. So we printed a new copy and stuffed it in an envelope for every request! When the printer hung, being dependent on the host system, its engine daemon hung in Device Wait on the server, and there was no way to unwedge it until we rebooted. So we'd all stop work, kick off the desktop user, reboot it, get the printer back, and try to pick up where we left off. Upon promotion, I was provisioned with a SPARCstation LX, and I promptly eschewed OpenWindows in favor of twm.I ran rc, mh, Emacs, and sometimes I would fire up NCSA Mosaic, because these weirdos on the Internet were starting to "blog" about what they ate for lunch.
hulitu 3y ago
Those are from a time when the UI/UX was called GUI and didn't get in the way of users.
- akiselev 3y ago
  Everything has to be an “experience” nowadays. I don’t want an “experience”, I just want a button that’s visually distinguished from the background that responds at 120 fps!
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  I dunno, windows 3.1 was and still is a bizarre mess of different UI ideas. It's like half original mac desktop, half norton commander and none of it makes sense. You even have the completely wacky MDI paradigm for many apps where you effectively put a window manager inside your window manager. It all really made no sense and there's a very good reason windows 95 threw it all away to start over with start menu and the desktop paradigm we all use today.
  - derefr 3y ago
    As far as I can tell, Windows 3.1 was designed around a pretty-coherent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface metaphor... as implemented on computers not powerful enough to actually do zooming UI. Think about it: windows "iconified" to the desktop, and the icons for many programs and document types were intended to look like (a stylized version of) what the program's main window would look like if shrunk down to that size. You had windows inside windows; and in programs like Program Manager, you could open up icons inside windows to get more windows inside your windows. All they needed to do is to make the windows that open up inside windows, open up embedded within the window that previously contained their icon (i.e. recursive MDI, rather than sibling MDI), and it'd have been true ZUI. Of course, that would have been an awful idea on hardware without the ability to render anti-aliased resampled images in real-time, nor any input device that could implement an analogue pinch-to-zoom gesture. But what I'm saying is, you could design an OS around "what Windows 3.1 was trying to do" today, and it'd be pretty cool.
mbork_pl 3y ago
Very interesting, although I was a bit disappointed by the lack of GEOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)).
mistrial9 3y ago
very odd that they are missing the first Mac there; secondly, those screenshots only hint at what it was like to use those.. half of those are almost useless without a two hour training class first. The combination of UI elements and sequence of operations, into the software itself.. not to be taken for granted in those days. It is also striking to reflect on the number of engineering hours in all of those, and how most of that is literally lost in today's mono-cultures.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > half of those are almost useless without a two hour training class first. Wait till you see the Ribbon.
- raphlinus 3y ago
  Toastytech[1] has a great many early Mac screenshots, as well as many others from around that time. [1]: http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html
juujian 3y ago
That's very cool! I just wish whoever captured those screenshots hadn't "posed" the computer for these screenshots. I am more curious how people would actually use them, not what these interfaces look like when you purposely try to show of their capabilities.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  Maybe some other folks familiar with the period can chime in, but from my recollection, it honestly wasn’t that different from today. A lot of the apps used then are still around, or have been succeeded by something very similar. Maybe the biggest difference was the prevalence of emulation in the mid-to-late 90s, as the UNIX workstation was losing out to desktop PCs and Macs. If you looked at my SparcStation at the time, I’d have been running Apple’s Macintosh Emulation Environment next to everything else: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Enviro...
netbioserror 3y ago
Latter NeXTStep feels like the peak of computing UI aesthetic. Maybe the abstractions and metaphors have improved a bit (I do think modern drag-and-drop icon-based file managers are probably an improvement), but everything interactable and non-interactable in those interfaces is crystal clear and unambiguous. Some of the themes I've seen around the Internet are spot-on perfect. Why did Linux so thoroughly abandon that look? Almost everything that works on Linux theme sites is...flat. FLAT. It's ALL FLAT.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  I have a functioning NeXT Cube on my desk that I’m quite fond of, but I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more. The UX feels like a bulky and weird variant of CDE, and I hate CDE. Icons and widgets consume too much space for no reason, and the entire UI feels complicated and involved for no appreciable benefit. I still think the pinnacle was BeOS, and that’s because it felt like a refined Mac System 7.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Well you could still have GNUstep or WindowMaker if you want to...
- msla 3y ago
  I've used Window Maker on Linux since before my current distro existed. https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/ It should be in any self-respecting package repository.
- ecliptik 3y ago
  I still use WindowMaker as my primary desktop GUI for Linux/BSD systems. It still holds up and is light on resources. The fact it really isn't updated anymore is a feature in itself. It doesn't work with Wayland afaik, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  >I do think modern drag-and-drop icon-based file managers are probably an improvement I largely agree, though using drag and drop with touchpads (or touchscreens) is a bit of a chore, as is with large or multi-monitor setups. Sometimes you have to pre-arrange your windows before you drag and drop or you run the risk of dragging and dropping in the wrong place. It was so much easier when all you had was 512x342 to work in.
idiocrat 3y ago
Sorry to be that guy again, but can I have my "Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0" back please? (When the world was still simple and the future was yet in the future). Some time ago a fellow NH user has proposed an interesting idea to build an ML UI transformer, which will sit on top of the broken MS Windows 2030 OS and transform the UI experience in real-time to the UI of my choice. Maybe spoof the RDP protocol?
- popey 3y ago
  Are you aware of SerenityOS? A rather pleasant homage to the wonderful UI you yearn for. https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    You can also use b00merang GTK+ themes to get the same look in GTK+3 and GTK+4 apps. The end result is extremely usable, even the new responsive and mobile-friendly interfaces in GTK+4 apps work just fine. (Unfortunately GTK+4 has lost out-of-the-box support for themes, so you must change GTK-global configuration instead.)
- ziotom78 3y ago
  I use the Reactionary [1] style on my Linux KDE desktop. Paired with the Windows95 widget style, it gives a very nice effect! [1] https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/ https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/
- msla 3y ago
  I always thought FVWM95 did a pretty good job of capturing the Windows 95 (and, therefore, Windows NT from the same era) look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95 Modern version: https://github.com/mintsuki/fvwm95 https://github.com/mintsuki/fvwm95 IceWM has an OK-ish Windows 95 theme, and might be easier to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM
  - hulitu 3y ago
rbanffy 3y ago
I love how Xerox imposed its own aesthetics on the PC emulation window. That font looks MUCH BETTER than anything on a real metal IBM PC. http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-pce.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...
- matja 3y ago
  Aesthetics, sure, functionality not so much - the 0 and O characters are identical...
  - stronglikedan 3y ago
    Also, icon kerning
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    Good point. I wonder why they'd make such a rookie mistake. Apart from deeply hating PCs, which is understandable.
zozbot234 3y ago
Nice showcase of a "Retina" display from as early as 1994. More information here: https://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=retinaz3&pg=1 https://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=retinaz3&pg=1 https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/retinaz3 https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/retinaz3
BenjaminDyer 3y ago
No HPUX, No party!
- rjsw 3y ago
  Fourth screenshot from the top.
  - BenjaminDyer 3y ago
    No glasses, No Party!
tomxor 3y ago
> Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 for PowerPC Wait what! That one slipped by me. MacOS on Intels and Windows on PowerPC feels like upside-down 90s.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  For a brief time NT 4 was competing directly with commercial unixes and supported all kinds of oddball architectures, and even had a POSIX compatibility layer ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem ).
- rejectfinite 3y ago
  NT kernel was made to be slapped on different architectures easy
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  There were no Intel Macs in the 90s though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
veave 3y ago
Don't forget https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
082349872349872 3y ago
celebrating 40 years of WIMP — what were your dreams in the 1980s, of UIs now? (as if I'm one to talk: almost all my billable work occurs in terminal windows, much of it on the command line, which —pace cursor addressing— goes back to the 1960s)
jrm4 3y ago
Ladies and gents, the source of my contempt for most modern Linux GUI "development." The "desktop" is mostly a solved problem, because it's just the thing you encounter BEFORE you get to your applications; flippin' openbox with a few minor addtional tweaks is fine for 99% of people.
threeio 3y ago
The real question is how many of these did you use or have exposure to during the time... I lost count after a while, but I also switched platforms all the time back in my youth ;)
DrBazza 3y ago
Good to see Arthur and RISCOS there, running on ARM. Back in the day, it was silly how much more performant it was than everything else available (especially PCs [1]). It's just a shame there was no market penetration in the US where the biggest sales would have been. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0x
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  Sounds like a similar story to Amiga.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  I've got RiscOS running on my pi 400. Neat little OS.
teddyh 3y ago
See also: • Graphical User Interface Gallery <http://toastytech.com/guis/ http://toastytech.com/guis/> • GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery <https://guidebookgallery.org/ https://guidebookgallery.org/> • Museum of UI <https://ui.codexpanse.com/ https://ui.codexpanse.com/> • The History of User Interfaces <https://history.user-interface.io/ https://history.user-interface.io/>
roryrjb 3y ago
Slightly off-topic, but a little while back someone shared an article with a screenshot of a lot of famous developers desktops including Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, Rasmus Lerdorf and a load of others (they are just the ones that come to mind). One of things I remember was the use of Windows for some historical Unix person and also one of them liking non-monospaced fonts. Can anyone find this link? Thanks in advance!
- boq 3y ago
  I think monospaced fonts are still popular in the plan9/golang crowd using the acme text editor. googling "dennis ritchie acme" leads to this : https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/ https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer... is that it ?
  - roryrjb 3y ago
    Thanks! This is exactly it. Previously I spent way too long searching for this.
rewgs 3y ago
Man, System 7.5 and the OS X Developer Preview 2 are so damn crisp. I know you can approximate that look on Linux, but it's never quite the real thing. I would do horrible things if I could have a modern desktop that truly looked like those.
- dflock 3y ago
  https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
- rcarmo 3y ago
  I still use System 7-like themes: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330
zwieback 3y ago
Some good memories for me hp, VMS, OS/2, spent a lot of time on those. Also good to see Geoworks in there, I seem to remember getting a $10 "working model" to play with back in the day.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I find it sad how small the differences are. They all follow an evolution that is far too cohesive. We need more chaos and innovation. They should have included Microsoft Bob. It was a huge failure economically but at least they tried something else.
jll29 3y ago
Thanks, seeing CDE and HP VUE evoke many fond memories again. And although I never used it, I have to say NextStep 1.0 aged rather well in comparison with many others GUIs in the list.
tabtab 3y ago
Most are probably still easier/saner to use & program with than the goddam DOM/HTML/CSS rendering via bloated JS libraries. We sorely need a state-ful GUI markup standard so we can get desktop-friendly GUI's over HTTP instead of rely on binary, proprietary, and/or DOM-JS-bloat tools. I kept hoping the web would eventually grow decent GUI standards, but it never did. Social networks and dancing-cat videos got all the attention, not real-work-GUIs. DOM is inherently the wrong tool for the job, and fixing it would break backward compatibility. More on DOM-fail: https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/12jt7i1/the_four_great_flaws_of_web_standards_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/12jt7i1/the_four...

215 points by zdw 3y ago

Ahh, my first workplace had a MicroVAX II and some SPARCstation 2s with a special place in my heart. We ran Ultrix/Motif and SunOS/OpenWindows, so these arcane screenies of MicroVMS, SunTools, and Display PostScript are educational for me. The MicroVax was sort of the secondary, older system but it intrigued me, and I hacked on it, securing some career advancement along the way. I'd already saved our reputation and revenue bigtime by overhauling our authentication server. When word got around that I'd reconfigured the Ultrix kernel to my liking, I feared a reprimand but received a promotion to sysadmin and a 33% raise. The SparcStation 2 was the jewel of the office and its printer was the bane of my existence. There was a storage pedestal and a SPARC Laser printer; this system was in a triple role as a desktop workstation, office print server, and customer/public Internet services of whatever sort existed before WWW. Now the SPARC Printer used Display Postscript as its engine, and that's why I'm ranting about it here on this article. Display Postscript-based printers are like WinModems: they're essentially dumb devices, and IIUC, they appear somewhat like a monitor to the host system. So the Postscript engine runs on the host and then zaps rendered pages out to the device. This is great in theory, and it's great in practice if you've got a dedicated print server and your printer never jams or fouls physically. Well guess what. We were heavy users on that thing, because everyone in the United States was phoning us asking how to get on the Internet, and we offered a free guide for that. So we printed a new copy and stuffed it in an envelope for every request! When the printer hung, being dependent on the host system, its engine daemon hung in Device Wait on the server, and there was no way to unwedge it until we rebooted. So we'd all stop work, kick off the desktop user, reboot it, get the printer back, and try to pick up where we left off. Upon promotion, I was provisioned with a SPARCstation LX, and I promptly eschewed OpenWindows in favor of twm.I ran rc, mh, Emacs, and sometimes I would fire up NCSA Mosaic, because these weirdos on the Internet were starting to "blog" about what they ate for lunch.

hulitu 3y ago

Those are from a time when the UI/UX was called GUI and didn't get in the way of users.

akiselev 3y ago
Everything has to be an “experience” nowadays. I don’t want an “experience”, I just want a button that’s visually distinguished from the background that responds at 120 fps!
qbasic_forever 3y ago
I dunno, windows 3.1 was and still is a bizarre mess of different UI ideas. It's like half original mac desktop, half norton commander and none of it makes sense. You even have the completely wacky MDI paradigm for many apps where you effectively put a window manager inside your window manager. It all really made no sense and there's a very good reason windows 95 threw it all away to start over with start menu and the desktop paradigm we all use today.
- derefr 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, Windows 3.1 was designed around a pretty-coherent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface metaphor... as implemented on computers not powerful enough to actually do zooming UI. Think about it: windows "iconified" to the desktop, and the icons for many programs and document types were intended to look like (a stylized version of) what the program's main window would look like if shrunk down to that size. You had windows inside windows; and in programs like Program Manager, you could open up icons inside windows to get more windows inside your windows. All they needed to do is to make the windows that open up inside windows, open up embedded within the window that previously contained their icon (i.e. recursive MDI, rather than sibling MDI), and it'd have been true ZUI. Of course, that would have been an awful idea on hardware without the ability to render anti-aliased resampled images in real-time, nor any input device that could implement an analogue pinch-to-zoom gesture. But what I'm saying is, you could design an OS around "what Windows 3.1 was trying to do" today, and it'd be pretty cool.

mbork_pl 3y ago

Very interesting, although I was a bit disappointed by the lack of GEOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)).

mistrial9 3y ago

very odd that they are missing the first Mac there; secondly, those screenshots only hint at what it was like to use those.. half of those are almost useless without a two hour training class first. The combination of UI elements and sequence of operations, into the software itself.. not to be taken for granted in those days. It is also striking to reflect on the number of engineering hours in all of those, and how most of that is literally lost in today's mono-cultures.

hulitu 3y ago
> half of those are almost useless without a two hour training class first. Wait till you see the Ribbon.
raphlinus 3y ago
Toastytech[1] has a great many early Mac screenshots, as well as many others from around that time. [1]: http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html

juujian 3y ago

That's very cool! I just wish whoever captured those screenshots hadn't "posed" the computer for these screenshots. I am more curious how people would actually use them, not what these interfaces look like when you purposely try to show of their capabilities.

catiopatio 3y ago
Maybe some other folks familiar with the period can chime in, but from my recollection, it honestly wasn’t that different from today. A lot of the apps used then are still around, or have been succeeded by something very similar. Maybe the biggest difference was the prevalence of emulation in the mid-to-late 90s, as the UNIX workstation was losing out to desktop PCs and Macs. If you looked at my SparcStation at the time, I’d have been running Apple’s Macintosh Emulation Environment next to everything else: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Enviro...

netbioserror 3y ago

Latter NeXTStep feels like the peak of computing UI aesthetic. Maybe the abstractions and metaphors have improved a bit (I do think modern drag-and-drop icon-based file managers are probably an improvement), but everything interactable and non-interactable in those interfaces is crystal clear and unambiguous. Some of the themes I've seen around the Internet are spot-on perfect. Why did Linux so thoroughly abandon that look? Almost everything that works on Linux theme sites is...flat. FLAT. It's ALL FLAT.

catiopatio 3y ago
I have a functioning NeXT Cube on my desk that I’m quite fond of, but I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more. The UX feels like a bulky and weird variant of CDE, and I hate CDE. Icons and widgets consume too much space for no reason, and the entire UI feels complicated and involved for no appreciable benefit. I still think the pinnacle was BeOS, and that’s because it felt like a refined Mac System 7.
steve1977 3y ago
Well you could still have GNUstep or WindowMaker if you want to...
msla 3y ago
I've used Window Maker on Linux since before my current distro existed. https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/ It should be in any self-respecting package repository.
ecliptik 3y ago
I still use WindowMaker as my primary desktop GUI for Linux/BSD systems. It still holds up and is light on resources. The fact it really isn't updated anymore is a feature in itself. It doesn't work with Wayland afaik, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
deltarholamda 3y ago
>I do think modern drag-and-drop icon-based file managers are probably an improvement I largely agree, though using drag and drop with touchpads (or touchscreens) is a bit of a chore, as is with large or multi-monitor setups. Sometimes you have to pre-arrange your windows before you drag and drop or you run the risk of dragging and dropping in the wrong place. It was so much easier when all you had was 512x342 to work in.

idiocrat 3y ago

Sorry to be that guy again, but can I have my "Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0" back please? (When the world was still simple and the future was yet in the future). Some time ago a fellow NH user has proposed an interesting idea to build an ML UI transformer, which will sit on top of the broken MS Windows 2030 OS and transform the UI experience in real-time to the UI of my choice. Maybe spoof the RDP protocol?

popey 3y ago
Are you aware of SerenityOS? A rather pleasant homage to the wonderful UI you yearn for. https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
- zozbot234 3y ago
  You can also use b00merang GTK+ themes to get the same look in GTK+3 and GTK+4 apps. The end result is extremely usable, even the new responsive and mobile-friendly interfaces in GTK+4 apps work just fine. (Unfortunately GTK+4 has lost out-of-the-box support for themes, so you must change GTK-global configuration instead.)
ziotom78 3y ago
I use the Reactionary [1] style on my Linux KDE desktop. Paired with the Windows95 widget style, it gives a very nice effect! [1] https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/ https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/
msla 3y ago
I always thought FVWM95 did a pretty good job of capturing the Windows 95 (and, therefore, Windows NT from the same era) look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95 Modern version: https://github.com/mintsuki/fvwm95 https://github.com/mintsuki/fvwm95 IceWM has an OK-ish Windows 95 theme, and might be easier to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM
- hulitu 3y ago

rbanffy 3y ago

I love how Xerox imposed its own aesthetics on the PC emulation window. That font looks MUCH BETTER than anything on a real metal IBM PC. http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-pce.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p...

matja 3y ago
Aesthetics, sure, functionality not so much - the 0 and O characters are identical...
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Also, icon kerning
- rbanffy 3y ago
  Good point. I wonder why they'd make such a rookie mistake. Apart from deeply hating PCs, which is understandable.

zozbot234 3y ago

Nice showcase of a "Retina" display from as early as 1994. More information here: https://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=retinaz3&pg=1 https://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=retinaz3&pg=1 https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/retinaz3 https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/retinaz3

BenjaminDyer 3y ago

No HPUX, No party!

rjsw 3y ago
Fourth screenshot from the top.
- BenjaminDyer 3y ago
  No glasses, No Party!

tomxor 3y ago

> Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 for PowerPC Wait what! That one slipped by me. MacOS on Intels and Windows on PowerPC feels like upside-down 90s.

qbasic_forever 3y ago
For a brief time NT 4 was competing directly with commercial unixes and supported all kinds of oddball architectures, and even had a POSIX compatibility layer ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem ).
rejectfinite 3y ago
NT kernel was made to be slapped on different architectures easy
ranger_danger 3y ago
There were no Intel Macs in the 90s though.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

veave 3y ago

Don't forget https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

082349872349872 3y ago

celebrating 40 years of WIMP — what were your dreams in the 1980s, of UIs now? (as if I'm one to talk: almost all my billable work occurs in terminal windows, much of it on the command line, which —pace cursor addressing— goes back to the 1960s)

jrm4 3y ago

Ladies and gents, the source of my contempt for most modern Linux GUI "development." The "desktop" is mostly a solved problem, because it's just the thing you encounter BEFORE you get to your applications; flippin' openbox with a few minor addtional tweaks is fine for 99% of people.

threeio 3y ago

The real question is how many of these did you use or have exposure to during the time... I lost count after a while, but I also switched platforms all the time back in my youth ;)

DrBazza 3y ago

Good to see Arthur and RISCOS there, running on ARM. Back in the day, it was silly how much more performant it was than everything else available (especially PCs [1]). It's just a shame there was no market penetration in the US where the biggest sales would have been. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0x

Der_Einzige 3y ago
Sounds like a similar story to Amiga.
sillywalk 3y ago
I've got RiscOS running on my pi 400. Neat little OS.

teddyh 3y ago

See also: • Graphical User Interface Gallery <http://toastytech.com/guis/ http://toastytech.com/guis/> • GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery <https://guidebookgallery.org/ https://guidebookgallery.org/> • Museum of UI <https://ui.codexpanse.com/ https://ui.codexpanse.com/> • The History of User Interfaces <https://history.user-interface.io/ https://history.user-interface.io/>

roryrjb 3y ago

Slightly off-topic, but a little while back someone shared an article with a screenshot of a lot of famous developers desktops including Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, Rasmus Lerdorf and a load of others (they are just the ones that come to mind). One of things I remember was the use of Windows for some historical Unix person and also one of them liking non-monospaced fonts. Can anyone find this link? Thanks in advance!

boq 3y ago
I think monospaced fonts are still popular in the plan9/golang crowd using the acme text editor. googling "dennis ritchie acme" leads to this : https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/ https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer... is that it ?
- roryrjb 3y ago
  Thanks! This is exactly it. Previously I spent way too long searching for this.

rewgs 3y ago

Man, System 7.5 and the OS X Developer Preview 2 are so damn crisp. I know you can approximate that look on Linux, but it's never quite the real thing. I would do horrible things if I could have a modern desktop that truly looked like those.

dflock 3y ago
https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
rcarmo 3y ago
I still use System 7-like themes: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330

zwieback 3y ago

Some good memories for me hp, VMS, OS/2, spent a lot of time on those. Also good to see Geoworks in there, I seem to remember getting a $10 "working model" to play with back in the day.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I find it sad how small the differences are. They all follow an evolution that is far too cohesive. We need more chaos and innovation. They should have included Microsoft Bob. It was a huge failure economically but at least they tried something else.

jll29 3y ago

Thanks, seeing CDE and HP VUE evoke many fond memories again. And although I never used it, I have to say NextStep 1.0 aged rather well in comparison with many others GUIs in the list.

tabtab 3y ago

Most are probably still easier/saner to use & program with than the goddam DOM/HTML/CSS rendering via bloated JS libraries. We sorely need a state-ful GUI markup standard so we can get desktop-friendly GUI's over HTTP instead of rely on binary, proprietary, and/or DOM-JS-bloat tools. I kept hoping the web would eventually grow decent GUI standards, but it never did. Social networks and dancing-cat videos got all the attention, not real-work-GUIs. DOM is inherently the wrong tool for the job, and fixing it would break backward compatibility. More on DOM-fail: https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/12jt7i1/the_four_great_flaws_of_web_standards_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/12jt7i1/the_four...