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Screenshots from Windows 95
- I_am_uncreative 3y agoThe Windows 95 user interface was really something special.
- pazimzadeh 3y agoYeah, it is special how almost every element is somehow looks slightly off-center. It's also pretty much ripped off of NEXTSTEP.
- sho_hn 3y agoIsn't a much bigger influence on Windows in general the IBM Common User Access material, which NeXTSTEP decidedly was not like? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access The app UI / interaction model patterns go deeper than "they both have greyscale 3D bevels".
- pazimzadeh 3y agoI don't think if you instructed someone to make a UI with greyscale 3D bevels it would look as close to NEXTSTEP as Windows 95 was. There's specific things like the source of light being on the top left, etc, which make them nearly identical.
- pmontra 3y agoThere is a good reason to have a light source on the top: it's the natural position of the sun and of most artificial light sources. Then it could be straight from the top, but you only get one side lit and furthermore it's not very natural as it happens rarely. Then it's only two choices, from the left or from the right. A coin flip? Actually no. Top left lightning has a long history for some good reasons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-left_lighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-left_lighting so we could say it's the only professional and safe choice
- pazimzadeh 3y ago> it could be straight from the top, but you only get one side lit No, you could have the top highlight be 2 pts deep and the sides be 1 pt and one shade darker, or something like that. There are many other ways to do it. > and furthermore it's not very natural as it happens rarely Every day from 10 am to noon (1/3rd of the day), and any time you have your back to the sun? > we could say it's the only professional and safe choice Mac OS X has top down lighting and it looks great. I think what you are trying to say is that you can't think of any other ways to design the buttons. Anyway, top left lighting is not the only detail they copied. BeOS had top-left lighting and still managed not to look like an exact clone of NEXTSTEP.
- acqq 3y agoFor the reference: NextStep 3.3 screenshot http://toastytech.com/guis/ns33nfsmanager.png http://toastytech.com/guis/ns33nfsmanager.png (3.0 released Sept 1992, 3.3 Feb 1995) Windows 95 released Aug 1995.
- steve1977 3y agoI mean the window close and maximize widgets are pretty much identical to NeXTSTEP... except they had slightly different semantics IIRC
- postmodest 3y agoIt had Big Motif Energy, IMHO.
- rvieira 3y agoThere's always a degree of subjectivity and personal taste, but I do consider this to be the peak of OS UIs. I have an "ironic" machine at home that is an old retina iMac, with Linux installed and themed with Chicago95. My attempt at a machine with a nice hardware, nice OS and nice UI :)
- RajT88 3y agoI too appreciate minimalist OS UI. I believe that graphical polish is just a distraction. It's part of why I like reading this site! When I have time to waste, I am happy to have something pretty and shiny to work with. For professional work, I want my OS to be snappy and without distractions.
- stavros 3y agoI agree with you. Buttons were immediately identifiable as such, menus had keyboard shortcuts visible everywhere, all items always looked the same across all apps, and everything was really snappy. We've really gone backwards since.
- TillE 3y agoAqua (in early versions of OS X) did a fantastic job of combining all this clear usability with a lot of fun visual flair. Even the old Qt/GTK themes which emulated that look were pretty good. It really is incredible how flat and boring modern macOS is.
- stavros 3y agoAh, I didn't have a Mac back then, but I can definitely believe that.
- cubefox 3y agoAt some point "skeuomorph" design went out of fashion, and everything had to be flat and simple. I think it all started with the Microsoft Zune (an MP3 player), which influenced Windows Phone, which influenced Windows 8. Then came iOS 7, and finally Android 5. I actually don't know when Mac OS went "flat". I only know ever since that time it is regularly unclear what a "button" is, as it doesn't look like a button.
- stavros 3y agoI used https://86box.net/ https://86box.net/ to install and run Windows 95, and it works perfectly.
- neilv 3y agoI avoid Microsoft whenever possible, but I can say that they did a lot of things well with Windows 95. I remember the pre-release hype of codename "Chicago", and even bought a book about their UI design, even though I was developing primarily for Unix workstations then. Also, the Win95 widgets look would still be more effective than most desktop looks/skins/themes today. Just modernize with some aesthetic tweaks that don't throw out the baby that works. Worst legacy of Windows 95, though: the extra keyboard keys where just Ctrl and Alt should be. New keys was a bold move, and made sense for their UI. But crowding my laptop keyboard with keys I don't want has cost me a lot of time for decades after, and made typing less fun.
- chungy 3y agoThis site makes some weird choices. Calendar: "This GUI doesn't have this feature" -- yes it does. Double click the clock. Clock: The old clock application is still part of Windows 95, but it's also in the corner. Address book: Depends on the version of Windows 95. Ones that came with IE3 or IE4 have an address book. CD player: maybe the floppy version lacked it? But Windows 95 definitely has a CD player. Browser: CD versions of Windows 95 came with Internet Explorer; depending on the version of 95, it could be IE2, IE3, or IE4. Desktop themes: Part of the Plus add-on. Most versions don't include it (some did, especially OEMs). Could probably count the Appearance tab of the display properties too. Logout screen: Windows 95 has it, but you'll have to connect it to a Netware or NT domain to show it. Good start, but those are the glaring omissions I spotted.
- Umofomia 3y agoIt looks like some of the omissions you mentioned are instead included on a separate page for the OEM Service Release 2 version of Windows 95: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoDouble clicking opens the date & time preferences (which already has a screenshot), not a calendar program. 9x did not ship with a clock or calendar program unless you upgraded from 3.x. The article mentions the clock in the taskbar explicitly. And unlike 98, 95 doesn't have a separate logout screen; it is always just another entry in the regular shutdown screen. The only glaring omission I see is the CD player, but I'd hardly call it glaring considering it is a non-default component, and many countries did not even get a CD version of 95 in the first place (or only OEM).
- chungy 3y agoI don't even think the CD Player is an optional component, my Windows 95 VM doesn't have it in the Add/Remove Programs dialog. It's just there.
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- avidphantasm 3y agoMS has only made the GUI worse in nearly 30 years. Astounding.
- pcurve 3y agoI do miss those clear buttons and input fields. I cannot tell you how much my 70 something year old Mom gets confused trying to figure out what's clickable vs not on modern apps and OS.
- throwaway2203 3y agoThis sure brought back memories!
- pornel 3y agoFlat design has destroyed UI readability. I can’t stand modern platforms that make me guess whether any piece of text is a button.
- another2another 3y agoWhat stands out to me though is how clear and straightforward to use the control panels were for e.g. mouse, keyboard, timezone and display. Their current counterparts are a bit of a mess and I find very difficult to navigate. Although they did lead to the infuriating click "Apply" then click Ok behaviour that people got into the habit of. And yes, that Desktop area of 640 by 480 pixels was what we started off with, and we liked it! Once I got a monitor that supported 1024 by 768 then it was just luxury.
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoD: Where are the SS of easter eggs? https://eeggs.com/tree/1154.html https://eeggs.com/tree/1154.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microso...
- xattt 3y agoWhy no love for the UI refinements of Win 98SE? (Proper USB support, Quick Launch buttons, proper multi-display support)
- Umofomia 3y ago> This is the first and only Windows to denote the current time zone on the map. Surprisingly, in the next editions of Windows, the world map simply occupies space and the highlight is nowhere to be seen. Explained here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42... > In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether. > The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.
- crazygringo 3y agoI thought this was solved by setting map boundaries according to your locale. Whatever country you set everything you, adjusts maps as well?
- nvella 3y agoI remember reading this site so much when I was eight years old. It's been around for at least sixteen years. Glad to see its still up, looks exactly the same too.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoAlmost everything I use now is either in the terminal or a browser/electron app. I do miss native gui elements that were respectful of your screen real estate.
- swatcoder 3y agoThere’s still dedication to that among macOS developers. It’s like an artisan trade at this point, but it’s still out there. Tons of useful, native macOS tools are available through SetApp (which is nicely curated) or other channels.
- postmodest 3y agoThe new System Settings would like to have a word about how all new UI is scrolling tablet-first UX.
- panzi 3y agoSmall side note: I think for GUI screenshots (especially of older software) you should add this CSS: img { image-rendering: pixelated; } On my 4k monitor it all looks blurred. (I have a bookmarklet that fixes it.)
- panzi 3y agoThe biggest downside of Windows GUIs was that it all was tiny non-resizable dialogs and non-copyable text labels. Did they fix this? I don't use Windows anymore.
- londons_explore 3y agoDid someone crop all these screenshots pixel-perfectly by hand? Or is there some tool to export windows that works on Windows 9x? Either way... What was the goal of the person who put clearly hours of effort into constructing this page?
- recursive 3y agoAlt prntscn
- nunez 3y agoI've set up Win95 many a time. Instant nostalgia. It's insane how long some of these UI elements persisted. The Displays pane looks basically the same in Windows 11!
- gus_massa 3y agoIIRC it was Win95... If you start the computer and do nothing for a while (30 seconds?) then a yellow arrow appears and moves to the start button, so people don't ges stuck the first time they uses Windows. (I can't find a an image.) Many years ago, I used a similar approach in an internal webpage that the T.A. must use without training. In the hallway usability tests many got stuck. I added an animated gif that is initially transparent, but after a while a yellow arrow appears to point to the "next" button.
- cbhl 3y agoOne thing that's I feel like is missing from this site: the blue screen of death. I've heard second-hand that these were mostly caused by third-party drivers for devices, and truly fixing it required rewriting the drivers in-house and deprecating the old driver model.
- jsiepkes 3y ago> I've heard second-hand that these were mostly caused by third-party drivers for devices, and truly fixing it required rewriting the drivers in-house and deprecating the old driver model. Windows 95 had some memory protection but it was rather basic compared to for example NT and UNIX'es. So it was pretty easy for a faulty piece of software to cause a kernel panic.
- herbst 3y agoIt's kinda weird that the windows desktop looks essentially the same today and not even talking about the config dialogs from then that are still there.
- cryptoz 3y agoIt’s now safe to turn off your computer.
- 0dayz 3y agoI have to say that what I slways loved about these os was the bitmap icons, the colorful tone to stick out I think even today works really well (except when they got the same icon in the backgroundwoth the front icon being different like web browser vs internet settings).
- expertentipp 3y agoSo many vivid memories associated especially with this desktop color, UI of the dial up, email, networking windows ... and until today I have no idea what the hell is "My Briefcase".
- mnmalst 3y agoAnd now compare that to https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/ :) They are doing a really good job keeping the old UI style alive.