4 ms·

They look hideous to me. The composition of colors and irritating fonts is just so over the top and distracting.

smackeyacky 2y ago
This was long before proper scaling fonts and pretty much all the windowing systems across Unices, OS/2 and other niche windowing systems for the PC all looked like this. Back then it looked like the future compared to a green screen or a DOS application
- bogantech 2y ago
  As long as you'd never seen a Macintosh or Amiga
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Macintosh were still black and white at the time, and really expensive, more so than PCs, a tradition that never changed. Amiga yes, but it got the fame of only being good for people doing games, thus it had a hard time getting adoption on business offices.
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      Windows 2 came out in December 1987. The Macintosh II (which introduced "full" palettized 8-bit color) had already come out in March 1987.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        While I stand corrected on the year being the same, there is the question of the price, which offered a 16 bit VGA, not 8 bit colour palette as you mentioned, at more affordable price point.
        rep_lodsb 2y ago
        16-color VGA, not 16 bits (which would be 65536 colors).
      - bigfatkitten 2y ago
        And you could buy a decent car for the price of the Mac II. Base model was twice the cost of a well specced PC/AT at the time. In terms of price it was in the same league as Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations, not the PC.
  - nkali 2y ago
    Amiga Workbench had a comically bad interface, though?
    - LocalH 2y ago
      I don't see why it would be called "comically bad" compared to its contemporaries. The 1.x series was a bit spartan, sure. But the UI itself afforded several unique features that weren't found anywhere else. The ability to have multiple "screens" or viewports with independent resolutions and color depths and drag them down to navigate between them seamlessly was quite useful, as was the ability to move windows on top/bottom of the stack without focusing the window (which is largely a forgotten paradigm, outside of forced "always on top" windows which is just a bandage over the lack of decoupled focus and window depth). AmigaOS certainly got better for the most part with the 2.x and 3.x series. Commodore's mismanagement is largely what did the Amiga in, not any technical aspects.
      - nkali 2y ago
        I was talking about the looks of the version 1. Technical side of things seems quite solid, and things have clearly improved by 2.x.
        lproven 2y ago
        I only became an Amiga owner in the 21st century, when it was all over bar the shouting, but friends owned them at the time and loved them. (I had an Acorn Archimedes with RISC OS 2.) As I understand it, the weird colours of AmigaDOS 1.x (blue, white, black and orange) were chosen to deliver usable contrast on an analogue TV set. This not only means a blurry CRT, but also that, given where the Amiga was designed and made, it was an NTSC TV. http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html I've never watched NTSC TV in my life but I remember the 1980s joke definition: "Never Twice the Same Colour".
        ilgazc 2y ago
        They have a good excuse for it. They designed everything to look readable/usable on average home TV. Add the loss of quality in RF modulator and you figure the crazy colour scheme with ultra simple icons.
- Modified3019 2y ago
  Another thing to keep in mind is that they’d be displayed on a CRT monitor, which makes the image much more forgivable in person.
- ilgazc 2y ago
  I agree to Steve Jobs non technical comment on this. They have no taste. Look to Macintosh interface where they just had 2 colours and comically lower resolution. OS/2 IBM ones look like a mainframe having a concept desktop. They don't have too much taste either. The low specs of the time isn't an excuse to ship ugly icons and fonts.
  - rep_lodsb 2y ago
    The resolution was actually higher on Mac. CGA (in its "high-resolution" monochrome mode) was only 640x200!
- canucker2016 2y ago
  Hey, at least Win 2.x allowed overlapping windows. Recall that Win 1.0x only permitted tiled windows. The PC graphics ecosystem was crap at the time (VGA was introduced around the time of Win 2.x shipping). from the OldNewThing blog, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13613 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13... : the Color Graphics Adapter, better known by the abbreviation CGA... ...320×200 color mode ...or 1:2.4 in 640×200 monochrome mode. Windows used the monochrome mode because the colors available in color mode were pretty useless. You could have black, white, hot pink, and aqua; or you could have black, brown, orange-red and green (no white!). ...next major advancement in display adapter technology was the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), which brought you a stunning 16 colors in a 640×350 grid with an aspect ratio of 1.83:1. But for the step forward in terms of color, you also took a step backwards into the insanity of planar video modes. EGA memory was arranged in planes, and what’s worse, each plane had the same memory address! You had to use other registers to program the video card to tell it which plane you wanted to talk to when you accessed a specific memory address. For many of the Mac developers, like Bill Atkinson, Mac OS was their second version of GUI OS, after working on the Lisa. And the Intel 8088's segmented memory architecture is more mental work than the flat address space of the Motorola 68K (all those data and address registers on the 68K are nice too). The pre-Win 3.0 fonts were ugly. That's why I ignored Windows and developed for the Mac.
  - nkali 2y ago
    I suspect that Windows used monochrome mode to squeeze 78 characters per line, not because the colours were "useless". CGA graphics is tricky, but it can look at least as pretty as contemporary ZX Spectrum: https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/640/927/455/original/0064bf0493df25c5.png https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/... Not very many people cared for CGA, though.
M95D 2y ago
Graphic cards at the time only had 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. 16 colors in total.
- herbst 2y ago
  Is there any reason they took the most ugly colours? They could have just used 16 nice colours or?
  - nkali 2y ago
    There is a reason why they're the most ugly colours. Windows 2 only can display 8 colours: CMY+RGB+Black+White. Cheap colour monitors had only four input pins - RGBI - and could at best display those eight colours, plus a darker version of them.
  - guestbest 2y ago
    They used the colors which had the best contrast against each other and if there was a driver issue, colors which looked the more appropriate in greyscale. Driver issues, forgotten today, drove most architectural decisions at Microsoft. The core word they used was ‘working with partners’. People used to bring it up all the time in interviews in the 80s regarding PC’s but not all in one computers like Apple and to a degree amiga. I remember people used to watch football on television on portable tv’s which was only made possible because the jerseys had a light and dark version which visiting teams would get to choose which one they get.
- rasz 2y ago
  VGA was already on the market for 9 months by the time Windows 2 released.
  - nkali 2y ago
    Imagine the backlash: "new Windows version requires a $300 video card and a $400 monitor to run". When Windows 95 finally dropped the support for EGA, many people were upset (including me).
  - 2y ago
nkali 2y ago
Windows 2 was an ugly duckling, yes. The interface was ham-fisted by coders, and it was supposed to support non-square monochrome pixels of CGA monitors, to make it worse. That being said, I am really curious about your perception of other old systems, as I am trying to design an interface that can run on the 80s hardware. What is the earliest OS that you can tolerate? Macintosh from 1984, Windows 3, Windows 95, something even later? If you have a moment, I would also appreciate your feedback on my UI, too. It is called "Orihime", and you can find the links to images in the "Pixel?art" section of ninakalinina.com/links.htm
- hyperhello 2y ago
  Orihime looks very CRT Nostalgic. I don’t care much for anime and it looks like you are pretty committed to it. I thought black and white MacOS was brilliant, but the amount of clicking and holding you had to do for everything is better left in the past.
  - nkali 2y ago
    Thank you! I'll take a note :)
- nunobrito 2y ago
  Nina, thank you for the article. Was really well written and a true pleasure to read. I've learned quite a number of new details, thanks to you.
hulitu 2y ago
> They look hideous to me. The composition of colors and irritating fonts is just so over the top and distracting. They look better than Windows 10 or 11. At least the GUI elements are visible, titlebars are titlebars and scrollbars have the right width and arrows.
n144q 2y ago
Well, you didn't really have many choices for colors and fonts back in the day.

This was long before proper scaling fonts and pretty much all the windowing systems across Unices, OS/2 and other niche windowing systems for the PC all looked like this. Back then it looked like the future compared to a green screen or a DOS application

bogantech 2y ago
As long as you'd never seen a Macintosh or Amiga
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Macintosh were still black and white at the time, and really expensive, more so than PCs, a tradition that never changed. Amiga yes, but it got the fame of only being good for people doing games, thus it had a hard time getting adoption on business offices.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    Windows 2 came out in December 1987. The Macintosh II (which introduced "full" palettized 8-bit color) had already come out in March 1987.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      While I stand corrected on the year being the same, there is the question of the price, which offered a 16 bit VGA, not 8 bit colour palette as you mentioned, at more affordable price point.
      - rep_lodsb 2y ago
        16-color VGA, not 16 bits (which would be 65536 colors).
    - bigfatkitten 2y ago
      And you could buy a decent car for the price of the Mac II. Base model was twice the cost of a well specced PC/AT at the time. In terms of price it was in the same league as Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations, not the PC.
- nkali 2y ago
  Amiga Workbench had a comically bad interface, though?
  - LocalH 2y ago
    I don't see why it would be called "comically bad" compared to its contemporaries. The 1.x series was a bit spartan, sure. But the UI itself afforded several unique features that weren't found anywhere else. The ability to have multiple "screens" or viewports with independent resolutions and color depths and drag them down to navigate between them seamlessly was quite useful, as was the ability to move windows on top/bottom of the stack without focusing the window (which is largely a forgotten paradigm, outside of forced "always on top" windows which is just a bandage over the lack of decoupled focus and window depth). AmigaOS certainly got better for the most part with the 2.x and 3.x series. Commodore's mismanagement is largely what did the Amiga in, not any technical aspects.
    - nkali 2y ago
      I was talking about the looks of the version 1. Technical side of things seems quite solid, and things have clearly improved by 2.x.
      - lproven 2y ago
        I only became an Amiga owner in the 21st century, when it was all over bar the shouting, but friends owned them at the time and loved them. (I had an Acorn Archimedes with RISC OS 2.) As I understand it, the weird colours of AmigaDOS 1.x (blue, white, black and orange) were chosen to deliver usable contrast on an analogue TV set. This not only means a blurry CRT, but also that, given where the Amiga was designed and made, it was an NTSC TV. http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html I've never watched NTSC TV in my life but I remember the 1980s joke definition: "Never Twice the Same Colour".
      - ilgazc 2y ago
        They have a good excuse for it. They designed everything to look readable/usable on average home TV. Add the loss of quality in RF modulator and you figure the crazy colour scheme with ultra simple icons.
Modified3019 2y ago
Another thing to keep in mind is that they’d be displayed on a CRT monitor, which makes the image much more forgivable in person.
ilgazc 2y ago
I agree to Steve Jobs non technical comment on this. They have no taste. Look to Macintosh interface where they just had 2 colours and comically lower resolution. OS/2 IBM ones look like a mainframe having a concept desktop. They don't have too much taste either. The low specs of the time isn't an excuse to ship ugly icons and fonts.
- rep_lodsb 2y ago
  The resolution was actually higher on Mac. CGA (in its "high-resolution" monochrome mode) was only 640x200!
canucker2016 2y ago
Hey, at least Win 2.x allowed overlapping windows. Recall that Win 1.0x only permitted tiled windows. The PC graphics ecosystem was crap at the time (VGA was introduced around the time of Win 2.x shipping). from the OldNewThing blog, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13613 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13... : the Color Graphics Adapter, better known by the abbreviation CGA... ...320×200 color mode ...or 1:2.4 in 640×200 monochrome mode. Windows used the monochrome mode because the colors available in color mode were pretty useless. You could have black, white, hot pink, and aqua; or you could have black, brown, orange-red and green (no white!). ...next major advancement in display adapter technology was the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), which brought you a stunning 16 colors in a 640×350 grid with an aspect ratio of 1.83:1. But for the step forward in terms of color, you also took a step backwards into the insanity of planar video modes. EGA memory was arranged in planes, and what’s worse, each plane had the same memory address! You had to use other registers to program the video card to tell it which plane you wanted to talk to when you accessed a specific memory address. For many of the Mac developers, like Bill Atkinson, Mac OS was their second version of GUI OS, after working on the Lisa. And the Intel 8088's segmented memory architecture is more mental work than the flat address space of the Motorola 68K (all those data and address registers on the 68K are nice too). The pre-Win 3.0 fonts were ugly. That's why I ignored Windows and developed for the Mac.
- nkali 2y ago
  I suspect that Windows used monochrome mode to squeeze 78 characters per line, not because the colours were "useless". CGA graphics is tricky, but it can look at least as pretty as contemporary ZX Spectrum: https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/640/927/455/original/0064bf0493df25c5.png https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/... Not very many people cared for CGA, though.

M95D 2y ago

Graphic cards at the time only had 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. 16 colors in total.

herbst 2y ago
Is there any reason they took the most ugly colours? They could have just used 16 nice colours or?
- nkali 2y ago
  There is a reason why they're the most ugly colours. Windows 2 only can display 8 colours: CMY+RGB+Black+White. Cheap colour monitors had only four input pins - RGBI - and could at best display those eight colours, plus a darker version of them.
- guestbest 2y ago
  They used the colors which had the best contrast against each other and if there was a driver issue, colors which looked the more appropriate in greyscale. Driver issues, forgotten today, drove most architectural decisions at Microsoft. The core word they used was ‘working with partners’. People used to bring it up all the time in interviews in the 80s regarding PC’s but not all in one computers like Apple and to a degree amiga. I remember people used to watch football on television on portable tv’s which was only made possible because the jerseys had a light and dark version which visiting teams would get to choose which one they get.
rasz 2y ago
VGA was already on the market for 9 months by the time Windows 2 released.
- nkali 2y ago
  Imagine the backlash: "new Windows version requires a $300 video card and a $400 monitor to run". When Windows 95 finally dropped the support for EGA, many people were upset (including me).
- 2y ago

nkali 2y ago

Windows 2 was an ugly duckling, yes. The interface was ham-fisted by coders, and it was supposed to support non-square monochrome pixels of CGA monitors, to make it worse. That being said, I am really curious about your perception of other old systems, as I am trying to design an interface that can run on the 80s hardware. What is the earliest OS that you can tolerate? Macintosh from 1984, Windows 3, Windows 95, something even later? If you have a moment, I would also appreciate your feedback on my UI, too. It is called "Orihime", and you can find the links to images in the "Pixel?art" section of ninakalinina.com/links.htm

hyperhello 2y ago
Orihime looks very CRT Nostalgic. I don’t care much for anime and it looks like you are pretty committed to it. I thought black and white MacOS was brilliant, but the amount of clicking and holding you had to do for everything is better left in the past.
- nkali 2y ago
  Thank you! I'll take a note :)
nunobrito 2y ago
Nina, thank you for the article. Was really well written and a true pleasure to read. I've learned quite a number of new details, thanks to you.

hulitu 2y ago

> They look hideous to me. The composition of colors and irritating fonts is just so over the top and distracting. They look better than Windows 10 or 11. At least the GUI elements are visible, titlebars are titlebars and scrollbars have the right width and arrows.

n144q 2y ago

Well, you didn't really have many choices for colors and fonts back in the day.