6 ms·

The peak of mouse-driven GUI was Windows 98. The icon designs, the customization, and the animation is unmatched even today. https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-i

by 1970-01-01 3y ago

The peak of mouse-driven GUI was Windows 98. The icon designs, the customization, and the animation is unmatched even today. https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/ https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/

afavour 3y ago
I remember preferring Windows 2000 but can’t remember exactly why. Very similar to 98 but felt more refined somehow.
- mvkel 3y ago
  For me it was the top window gradient. I think in win98 it was 256 colors and in windows 2000 it was 16-bit
- estebank 3y ago
  NT kernel with it's related stability, true-color interface, no XP "fisher price" UI. 2000 was probably the pinnacle of that era's design language. Ironically, XP made it more feasible to use 2000 day to day as drivers for XP worked on the earlier 2000.
  - derefr 3y ago
    Re: XP UI — did you ever try Windows Server 2003?
    - EvanAnderson 3y ago
      Server 2003 was my daily driver on a laptop for a few years. Most XP software ran fine but it had none of the XP visual cruft. Until Windows 7 it was peak Windows for me.
      - deepspace 3y ago
        I ran that rare beast, Windows XP64. It was basically Server2003 x64 with the XP UI. Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux. That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.
        EvanAnderson 3y ago
        XP64 was an odd animal. I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain. I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.
        bonton89 3y ago
        I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.
        sillywalk 3y ago
        Was that XP for x86-64 or XP for Itanium? I'd imagine both were pretty rare.
    - genmud 3y ago
      IIRC you could actually run XP themes on 2k3 if you started the theme service. Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel (I think server / 5.2 had a slightly different IP stack and some server tweaks for task scheduling, shadow volumes and memory caching). Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.
      - chungy 3y ago
        > Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :) But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance. It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)
  - int_19h 3y ago
    XP "fisher price" UI was trivial to disable in settings, giving you that same slate gray look of 98/2K, but with 24-bit color icons. This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).
    - abhiyerra 3y ago
      I know this sounds petty but the XP’s Classic’s task bar gray was ever slightly off from Windows 2000 and it drove me nuts. I think Windows 2000 was visually the best.
      - keyringlight 3y ago
        Once you were back to the 9x/2k style chrome, I'm fairly sure you also had access to the older style of color/size customization for it as well. On a minor tangent, I miss how well the high contrast theme used to display on windows itself and the majority of applications that were still made within that standard toolkit, using it now seems to lack polish and most applications are doing their own thing within their window.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        It was slightly warmer than 2K (which itself was noticeably warmer than 98). However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      While you could disable the fisher price theme in XP (and Vista and 7), even in classic theme you still had the "plastic" icons.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        Yup, but this was all customizable. In fact it even included the old icons in the box - they were used if you ever set it to use 8-bit color mode - so you just needed to point the shell at the right DLLs in the registry (for which there were third-party utilities). It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    I always thought that the Windows XP color theme was vastly over hated. I thought it looked nice, but even if one didn't enjoy it, I cannot understand why people acted like it killed their dog.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It was grating. If XP had worked on release as well as it did three years later there would have been little complaining. But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.
    - Narishma 3y ago
      I hated the blue and red default but was fine with the two other alternatives.
- retrac 3y ago
  Windows 2000 was based on NT. While it had the Windows 98 interface it was very different underneath. It's a bit bonkers, but MS sold two superficially-identical operating systems for five plus years, that were in reality, about as different as two OSes could be; different histories, different underlying architecture, little code shared between the kernels and only part of the userland. And yet the two OS families had almost exactly the same UI and API.
  - nikau 3y ago
    it made sense at the time, pcs had limited ram and win98 ran much better.
    - EvanAnderson 3y ago
      With a decent amount of RAM, though, 2000 was far more stable.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry. How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s. So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today. There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_128mb_of_ram_cost_in_1999/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12... [2]: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239
        3y ago
- ack_complete 3y ago
  IIRC, Windows 2000 had an overall bluer theme that reduced the green background and orange-tinged 3D colors of 98, and brought in a new set of icons. Also, it added alpha blending to GDI and started using it in Explorer.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    It also used a lighter base gray than 95/98 did, which contributed to it feeling significantly less dreary. This is why for me, the canonical “classic Windows” theme is the 2k version.
    - amlib 3y ago
      The base color also had an off-white beige tone to it. To this day I'm curious if this was made as an attempt to counter balance the usual white balance of pc monitors at the time, which where set at or above 9300K, producing a blue-ish tint.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    When win2000 was still in testing (was this called Memphis, can't remember) the UI elements like the X to close the window would light up in blue. Never made it to release.
- marpstar 3y ago
  USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me... The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows_2000_hero.jpg https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...
  - jwells89 3y ago
    In general I’m a fan of the aesthetic of Win2K’s icons. Strikes a nice middleground between old and new, and as you’ve described it’s just satisfying somehow.
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  Win 2000 is the first MS Windows that did not crash very often. I used it as my primary desktop OS for as long as I could until I switched to XP. The best Windows IMHO.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    I agree. I still feel deeply nostalgic for Windows 2000. Everything was instant. And almost every program did more than what Slack does today and yet Slack is sluggishly slow. We went wrong somewhere.
    - markus_zhang 3y ago
      100%. And the UI is intuitive. If it looks like a button, it is. The scrollbar doesn't disappear randomly and actually is wide enough to grab easily. Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.
      - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
        Flat design was welcomed by a lot of designers as it required far lesser skill compared to designers before the flat era. As a result it spread rapidly.
        markus_zhang 3y ago
        Thanks for the explanation, but why? Is drawing a proper button that hard comparing to a rectangle?
        JoshuaRogers 3y ago
        This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…) And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.) To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.
- dep_b 3y ago
  I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it. It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB. It ran all games and applications that I tried to run. I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility. It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I remember editing driver INI files to get newer video cards to install on 2000. They’d ship with XP drivers but you just needed to modify the INI to let them show up and work in 2K.
philistine 3y ago
Well, I wouldn't pick the RC Cola of UIs. I'd pick the original.
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  In this instance are you stanning Windows 1 (lol), MacOS 1, Lisa, the Xerox Alto, or NLS?
  - philistine 3y ago
    Yes
- JoshuaRogers 3y ago
  As long as you also choose the Moon Pie of UIs to go with it, you’ll be fine.
xanderlewis 3y ago
I somewhat agree… but the force of nostalgia surely is slightly biasing, don’t you think?
- windows2020 3y ago
  Windows 98 was from a time where the assumption a user was familiar with the computer wasn't made. We've since lost that assumption, and a lot with it.
- samplatt 3y ago
  Little of column a, little of column b. Yes, nostalgia is a factor, BUT: - The lack of overhead required by security and 'features' like querying an internet search when you click the start menu or showing advertising in the calculator or better memory management in general, meant that overall UI response in that era used to be much _MUCH_ faster than it is today. Once upon a time you could operate your O/S with the speed of a Starcraft tournament winner; this simply is not possible any more. - You could 'queue' commands - clicking the close button on an program and then (before it had finished closing) clicking the minimise button would minimise the program behind it immediately after the closing process finished. In this way you could chain/queue commands rather than being forced to wait for the OS to update between each step. - Enter and Spacebar did different things. If a prompt had two buttons, one would be outlined with a thick black line that would respond to [Enter], and one would be outlined in a dotted line that would respond to [spacebar]. This is still the case sometimes but is far from ubiquitous. - The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click. Though still used by some MS programs today like Explorer, its usefulness is lessened if not all programs utilise it. - Don't even get me started on keyboard shortcuts. These kinds of universally-accepted and _useful_ power-user-oriented design principles are almost absent from UX as it is implemented today.
  - pndy 3y ago
    > The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click Pretty sure that's already a standard across all Windows version, plus Xfce and KDE have similar menus and the double-click to close feature
jchw 3y ago
I absolutely love the Isys Information Architects Inc. pages on UI, especially the Hall of Shame/Fame. They're a bit of a time capsule, but it honestly makes me think that it's not just pointless cynicism, UI design really has very long ago lost track of what matters. I can relate to a vast majority of the thoughts, even if I think we could do better now, if we tried. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm I feel like the style of the UI, though dated, helps a lot: the borders and hierarchy force you to think about how UI components are related, not just where they are on screen. Unlike, e.g. modern Firefox tabs, which just feel like weird floating text with arbitrary ugly borders that never seem to feel less alien no matter how long you use them. They're not literally unusable... but they're not particularly good, especially compared to what we had before. This gives me hope for projects like SerenityOS. A bit of oldschool UI design with some modern amenities. In theory, this seems like a good idea.
- thfuran 3y ago
  There have always been ui stinkers, but the early days of GUIs had companies spending large amounts of money treating usability as the major output of a serious engineering effort. Now, for all the talk about usability, the actual focus for most companies is on keeping up with the art movement de jour or with maximizing engagement or a similar metric that's only loosely related to usability.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Usability and engagement are usually inversely correlated. The more usable the software, the less time I need in it to perform my task.
    - kqr 3y ago
      And it's scary how often the developers themselves (in the widest sense of the word) don't realise this! They've picked targets and chase them without stopping to think that many applications are a means to an end, not an end itself. But it is a difficult balance. One has to define metrics that tell apart "user doesn't incorporate solution in their workflow" (bad) and "user completes their work using solution quickly" (good).
causality0 3y ago
Imagine a world where you know exactly where on the title bar you can click to drag a window around and where you can't. A world where you can tell how long pages are by glancing at the scroll bar. A world where you can tell what windows you have open because your taskbar icons are labeled. Enter the world of...Windows 98!
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  I never wanted a heart icon response on HN until now.
giobox 3y ago
For Windows, I probably agree too. Like others here though I had a soft spot for Windows 2000, everything felt slightly more refined in win2k. Personally I'd probably take some version of Mac OS 8/9 as peak mouse driven GUI design. The third party app ecosystem in Mac OS was a lot better about respecting UI conventions on the platform IMHO, Windows app UIs were all over the place for me during this period as they transitioned out of the DOS era. Simple things, like how installing apps was just dragging them to a folder, not the plethora of setup.exe examples found on Windows, were pretty nice back then on the Mac UI. There are of course lots of things that sucked about old Mac OS then - memory management etc - but the UI design was great.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Windows 2000 introduced layered windows (mouse pointer has a drop shadow!), transparency effects, and other features into the Shell [0]. In my opinion, having used Windows since 3.0, 2000 is my favorite in terms of icons, shell, etc. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507...
- nextos 3y ago
  SerenityOS replicates that look and feel. It is also implemented in a dialect of C++ that adheres to some of the good parts of C++98: https://serenityos.org https://serenityos.org
- pndy 3y ago
  > Like others here though I had a soft spot for Windows 2000, everything felt slightly more refined in win2k. I really like all the UI changes introduced in 2000. Especially the color palette: that subtle change from strong gray in 9x to lighter one worked pretty well. With all the gradients on icons, preview pane in Explorer, Tahoma as default UI font and introduction of transparency/fade elements I forget 98 SE quickly. And of course there was the stability of the NT - back then the price was lack of compatibility with games.
bluedino 3y ago
Except, it all went downhill with Active Desktop.
AndyKelley 3y ago
I used to think along similar lines, until three weeks ago when I tried KDE for the first time. I don't know why it took me so long to try it. KDE is an excellent steward of this style of user interface.
- TiredOfLife 3y ago
  Except the search in application launcher uses the Windows 10 method of showing random results in random order with added bonus of results rearranging after you stop typing.
  - AndyKelley 3y ago
    I agree with your criticism. However, the overarching design of KDE makes it reasonable because of configurability. There's an option for "always sort applications alphabetically", and the entire widget itself could be replaced with a different one. In fact there is even a concept of "alternative widgets" for this with two other options. I don't see something that matches your requirements that already exists but it seems like something that would be in scope for the project. Also this is on version 5 but they had a major release of 6 recently, and I don't know whether those changes included anything to this widget.
  - tomthehero 3y ago
    Yesss. Gnome also does this with its file manager. Worst design ever. Second to only S0 sleep. I use Pcmanfm in all my gnome installations to have sane file navigation.
bitwize 3y ago
Windows 95 had a better UI. Windows 98 was the beginning of Microsoft trying to Webify everything to cram Internet Explorer down everyone's throats. It had non-monopoly-related dangers; by making the difference between the desktop and web more ambiguous, it erased the "local things=relatively safe, network things=relatively risky" heuristic we internalized at the time. Not exactly 100% true in an era of Word macro viruses, but it was useful. I would nominate late AmigaOS or BeOS as having a better WIMP UI than any Windows.

afavour 3y ago

I remember preferring Windows 2000 but can’t remember exactly why. Very similar to 98 but felt more refined somehow.

mvkel 3y ago
For me it was the top window gradient. I think in win98 it was 256 colors and in windows 2000 it was 16-bit
estebank 3y ago
NT kernel with it's related stability, true-color interface, no XP "fisher price" UI. 2000 was probably the pinnacle of that era's design language. Ironically, XP made it more feasible to use 2000 day to day as drivers for XP worked on the earlier 2000.
- derefr 3y ago
  Re: XP UI — did you ever try Windows Server 2003?
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    Server 2003 was my daily driver on a laptop for a few years. Most XP software ran fine but it had none of the XP visual cruft. Until Windows 7 it was peak Windows for me.
    - deepspace 3y ago
      I ran that rare beast, Windows XP64. It was basically Server2003 x64 with the XP UI. Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux. That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.
      - EvanAnderson 3y ago
        XP64 was an odd animal. I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain. I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.
      - bonton89 3y ago
        I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.
      - sillywalk 3y ago
        Was that XP for x86-64 or XP for Itanium? I'd imagine both were pretty rare.
  - genmud 3y ago
    IIRC you could actually run XP themes on 2k3 if you started the theme service. Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel (I think server / 5.2 had a slightly different IP stack and some server tweaks for task scheduling, shadow volumes and memory caching). Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.
    - chungy 3y ago
      > Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :) But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance. It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)
- int_19h 3y ago
  XP "fisher price" UI was trivial to disable in settings, giving you that same slate gray look of 98/2K, but with 24-bit color icons. This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).
  - abhiyerra 3y ago
    I know this sounds petty but the XP’s Classic’s task bar gray was ever slightly off from Windows 2000 and it drove me nuts. I think Windows 2000 was visually the best.
    - keyringlight 3y ago
      Once you were back to the 9x/2k style chrome, I'm fairly sure you also had access to the older style of color/size customization for it as well. On a minor tangent, I miss how well the high contrast theme used to display on windows itself and the majority of applications that were still made within that standard toolkit, using it now seems to lack polish and most applications are doing their own thing within their window.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      It was slightly warmer than 2K (which itself was noticeably warmer than 98). However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    While you could disable the fisher price theme in XP (and Vista and 7), even in classic theme you still had the "plastic" icons.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      Yup, but this was all customizable. In fact it even included the old icons in the box - they were used if you ever set it to use 8-bit color mode - so you just needed to point the shell at the right DLLs in the registry (for which there were third-party utilities). It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  I always thought that the Windows XP color theme was vastly over hated. I thought it looked nice, but even if one didn't enjoy it, I cannot understand why people acted like it killed their dog.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It was grating. If XP had worked on release as well as it did three years later there would have been little complaining. But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    I hated the blue and red default but was fine with the two other alternatives.
retrac 3y ago
Windows 2000 was based on NT. While it had the Windows 98 interface it was very different underneath. It's a bit bonkers, but MS sold two superficially-identical operating systems for five plus years, that were in reality, about as different as two OSes could be; different histories, different underlying architecture, little code shared between the kernels and only part of the userland. And yet the two OS families had almost exactly the same UI and API.
- nikau 3y ago
  it made sense at the time, pcs had limited ram and win98 ran much better.
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    With a decent amount of RAM, though, 2000 was far more stable.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry. How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s. So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today. There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_128mb_of_ram_cost_in_1999/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12... [2]: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239
      - 3y ago
ack_complete 3y ago
IIRC, Windows 2000 had an overall bluer theme that reduced the green background and orange-tinged 3D colors of 98, and brought in a new set of icons. Also, it added alpha blending to GDI and started using it in Explorer.
- jwells89 3y ago
  It also used a lighter base gray than 95/98 did, which contributed to it feeling significantly less dreary. This is why for me, the canonical “classic Windows” theme is the 2k version.
  - amlib 3y ago
    The base color also had an off-white beige tone to it. To this day I'm curious if this was made as an attempt to counter balance the usual white balance of pc monitors at the time, which where set at or above 9300K, producing a blue-ish tint.
- pixl97 3y ago
  When win2000 was still in testing (was this called Memphis, can't remember) the UI elements like the X to close the window would light up in blue. Never made it to release.
marpstar 3y ago
USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me... The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows_2000_hero.jpg https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...
- jwells89 3y ago
  In general I’m a fan of the aesthetic of Win2K’s icons. Strikes a nice middleground between old and new, and as you’ve described it’s just satisfying somehow.
markus_zhang 3y ago
Win 2000 is the first MS Windows that did not crash very often. I used it as my primary desktop OS for as long as I could until I switched to XP. The best Windows IMHO.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  I agree. I still feel deeply nostalgic for Windows 2000. Everything was instant. And almost every program did more than what Slack does today and yet Slack is sluggishly slow. We went wrong somewhere.
  - markus_zhang 3y ago
    100%. And the UI is intuitive. If it looks like a button, it is. The scrollbar doesn't disappear randomly and actually is wide enough to grab easily. Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
      Flat design was welcomed by a lot of designers as it required far lesser skill compared to designers before the flat era. As a result it spread rapidly.
      - markus_zhang 3y ago
        Thanks for the explanation, but why? Is drawing a proper button that hard comparing to a rectangle?
      - JoshuaRogers 3y ago
        This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…) And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.) To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.
dep_b 3y ago
I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it. It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB. It ran all games and applications that I tried to run. I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility. It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I remember editing driver INI files to get newer video cards to install on 2000. They’d ship with XP drivers but you just needed to modify the INI to let them show up and work in 2K.

philistine 3y ago

Well, I wouldn't pick the RC Cola of UIs. I'd pick the original.

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
In this instance are you stanning Windows 1 (lol), MacOS 1, Lisa, the Xerox Alto, or NLS?
- philistine 3y ago
  Yes
JoshuaRogers 3y ago
As long as you also choose the Moon Pie of UIs to go with it, you’ll be fine.

xanderlewis 3y ago

I somewhat agree… but the force of nostalgia surely is slightly biasing, don’t you think?

windows2020 3y ago
Windows 98 was from a time where the assumption a user was familiar with the computer wasn't made. We've since lost that assumption, and a lot with it.
samplatt 3y ago
Little of column a, little of column b. Yes, nostalgia is a factor, BUT: - The lack of overhead required by security and 'features' like querying an internet search when you click the start menu or showing advertising in the calculator or better memory management in general, meant that overall UI response in that era used to be much _MUCH_ faster than it is today. Once upon a time you could operate your O/S with the speed of a Starcraft tournament winner; this simply is not possible any more. - You could 'queue' commands - clicking the close button on an program and then (before it had finished closing) clicking the minimise button would minimise the program behind it immediately after the closing process finished. In this way you could chain/queue commands rather than being forced to wait for the OS to update between each step. - Enter and Spacebar did different things. If a prompt had two buttons, one would be outlined with a thick black line that would respond to [Enter], and one would be outlined in a dotted line that would respond to [spacebar]. This is still the case sometimes but is far from ubiquitous. - The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click. Though still used by some MS programs today like Explorer, its usefulness is lessened if not all programs utilise it. - Don't even get me started on keyboard shortcuts. These kinds of universally-accepted and _useful_ power-user-oriented design principles are almost absent from UX as it is implemented today.
- pndy 3y ago
  > The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click Pretty sure that's already a standard across all Windows version, plus Xfce and KDE have similar menus and the double-click to close feature

jchw 3y ago

I absolutely love the Isys Information Architects Inc. pages on UI, especially the Hall of Shame/Fame. They're a bit of a time capsule, but it honestly makes me think that it's not just pointless cynicism, UI design really has very long ago lost track of what matters. I can relate to a vast majority of the thoughts, even if I think we could do better now, if we tried. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm I feel like the style of the UI, though dated, helps a lot: the borders and hierarchy force you to think about how UI components are related, not just where they are on screen. Unlike, e.g. modern Firefox tabs, which just feel like weird floating text with arbitrary ugly borders that never seem to feel less alien no matter how long you use them. They're not literally unusable... but they're not particularly good, especially compared to what we had before. This gives me hope for projects like SerenityOS. A bit of oldschool UI design with some modern amenities. In theory, this seems like a good idea.

thfuran 3y ago
There have always been ui stinkers, but the early days of GUIs had companies spending large amounts of money treating usability as the major output of a serious engineering effort. Now, for all the talk about usability, the actual focus for most companies is on keeping up with the art movement de jour or with maximizing engagement or a similar metric that's only loosely related to usability.
- stavros 3y ago
  Usability and engagement are usually inversely correlated. The more usable the software, the less time I need in it to perform my task.
  - kqr 3y ago
    And it's scary how often the developers themselves (in the widest sense of the word) don't realise this! They've picked targets and chase them without stopping to think that many applications are a means to an end, not an end itself. But it is a difficult balance. One has to define metrics that tell apart "user doesn't incorporate solution in their workflow" (bad) and "user completes their work using solution quickly" (good).

causality0 3y ago

Imagine a world where you know exactly where on the title bar you can click to drag a window around and where you can't. A world where you can tell how long pages are by glancing at the scroll bar. A world where you can tell what windows you have open because your taskbar icons are labeled. Enter the world of...Windows 98!

mixmastamyk 3y ago
I never wanted a heart icon response on HN until now.

giobox 3y ago

For Windows, I probably agree too. Like others here though I had a soft spot for Windows 2000, everything felt slightly more refined in win2k. Personally I'd probably take some version of Mac OS 8/9 as peak mouse driven GUI design. The third party app ecosystem in Mac OS was a lot better about respecting UI conventions on the platform IMHO, Windows app UIs were all over the place for me during this period as they transitioned out of the DOS era. Simple things, like how installing apps was just dragging them to a folder, not the plethora of setup.exe examples found on Windows, were pretty nice back then on the Mac UI. There are of course lots of things that sucked about old Mac OS then - memory management etc - but the UI design was great.

nullindividual 3y ago
Windows 2000 introduced layered windows (mouse pointer has a drop shadow!), transparency effects, and other features into the Shell [0]. In my opinion, having used Windows since 3.0, 2000 is my favorite in terms of icons, shell, etc. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507...
nextos 3y ago
SerenityOS replicates that look and feel. It is also implemented in a dialect of C++ that adheres to some of the good parts of C++98: https://serenityos.org https://serenityos.org
pndy 3y ago
> Like others here though I had a soft spot for Windows 2000, everything felt slightly more refined in win2k. I really like all the UI changes introduced in 2000. Especially the color palette: that subtle change from strong gray in 9x to lighter one worked pretty well. With all the gradients on icons, preview pane in Explorer, Tahoma as default UI font and introduction of transparency/fade elements I forget 98 SE quickly. And of course there was the stability of the NT - back then the price was lack of compatibility with games.

bluedino 3y ago

Except, it all went downhill with Active Desktop.

AndyKelley 3y ago

I used to think along similar lines, until three weeks ago when I tried KDE for the first time. I don't know why it took me so long to try it. KDE is an excellent steward of this style of user interface.

TiredOfLife 3y ago
Except the search in application launcher uses the Windows 10 method of showing random results in random order with added bonus of results rearranging after you stop typing.
- AndyKelley 3y ago
  I agree with your criticism. However, the overarching design of KDE makes it reasonable because of configurability. There's an option for "always sort applications alphabetically", and the entire widget itself could be replaced with a different one. In fact there is even a concept of "alternative widgets" for this with two other options. I don't see something that matches your requirements that already exists but it seems like something that would be in scope for the project. Also this is on version 5 but they had a major release of 6 recently, and I don't know whether those changes included anything to this widget.
- tomthehero 3y ago
  Yesss. Gnome also does this with its file manager. Worst design ever. Second to only S0 sleep. I use Pcmanfm in all my gnome installations to have sane file navigation.

bitwize 3y ago

Windows 95 had a better UI. Windows 98 was the beginning of Microsoft trying to Webify everything to cram Internet Explorer down everyone's throats. It had non-monopoly-related dangers; by making the difference between the desktop and web more ambiguous, it erased the "local things=relatively safe, network things=relatively risky" heuristic we internalized at the time. Not exactly 100% true in an era of Word macro viruses, but it was useful. I would nominate late AmigaOS or BeOS as having a better WIMP UI than any Windows.