6 ms·
The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme
- emperorcezar 10mo agoThis brings up so many memories
- blibble 10mo agoI'd rather use 3.1 with the hot dog scheme vs. windows 11... as long as it has trumpet winsock
- fsiefken 10mo agoI agree, and Calmira LFN 3.3 and Microsoft Office 4.3 Would Notepad++ work? What would you use as a graphical www browser? I mean even with win32s and modern ssl support somehow built-in it'd be challenge.
- UncleSlacky 10mo agoOpera 3.62 seems to be the latest browser available for Win 3.x, though I think Dillo might also be a possibility: https://computernewb.com/wiki/How_to_browse_the_web_on_very_old_computers#Windows_for_Workgroups_3.11 https://computernewb.com/wiki/How_to_browse_the_web_on_very_...
- anyfoo 10mo agoI haven't really used Windows for anything serious in more than 20 years (and I recently had to mess with Windows 11 and it was terrible), but I'm not sure you'd be very happy going back to Windows 3.1. It was a 16 bit system (it could run in "Enhanced Mode" which involves 32 bit protected mode, but in reality Windows itself, and the applications, were still 16 bit). That means the resource constraints were very real. Even if you had a lot of actual memory in your machine, the memory that was actually available for "general purpose" was effectively a few hundred kilobytes. There was also the notion of finite (and very generically-named) "system resources", and you could see in the "About" box how many percent of those you had free. Once they were gone, you were in trouble: USER.EXE and GDI.EXE each have a data segment (that is, heap) limited to 64K. The 8086/80286 platform architecture imposes this 64K limit. Program Manager checks the percentage of free heap space for both USER.EXE and GDI.EXE. It then reports the smaller of the two percentages.[1] All applications ran in the same address space. A broken application meant a total crash at best, subtle data corruption at worst. Multitasking was also cooperative, so apps could hold up other apps indefinitely, or just hang the entire system. Since it was not based on paging, to accommodate the very limited memory, entire segments could be swapped out, or even relocated, within the address space. As a programmer, that meant dealing with stuff like "locking pointers" so Windows wouldn't move your data segment under you. As a user, that could mean general slowness. It was firmly based on DOS. So many problems that you had in DOS, drivers or whatnot, would exist in Windows as well. There were better systems at the time that you could wish yourself back to, some number of them based on UNIX in some way or other. But Windows 3.11 had really pretty icons. The prettiest, in my mind. [1] https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/Patches/ftp.microsoft.com/MISC/KB/en-us/90/762.HTM https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/Patches/ftp.microsoft.com/MISC/KB/...
- blibble 10mo agoand yet... still better than Windows 11
- xnx 10mo agoBack when users picked the UI colors for the apps instead of the apps picking for the users.
- charcircuit 10mo agoPeople can self sabotage by choosing a bad theme, and then they engage with the app less or even churn. Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
- hulitu 10mo ago> Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with. See Win 95 resolution change workflow. This was 20 years ago. A lot of knowledge was lost since then.
- reaperducer 10mo agoand then they engage with the app less or even churn. If your content is so poor that a change of colors can make people leave, then perhaps your content is not worth having.
- charcircuit 10mo agoThe colors is part of the content of the product. And it's not that it is 100% more likely for someone to leave sooner, but that it increases the probability that people leave sooner.
- skydhash 10mo agoIt really isn’t, unless it’s a picture or a movie.
- toast0 10mo agoCertainly that's a good reason to force a legible version of settings, and the path to settings... But if the user sets the system to hot dog stand, the apps should be hot dog stand. If the user wants the system text font to be wingdings, they're in for a nasty time, but that doesn't mean an app should force a different font
- wesfenlon 10mo agoThanks for sharing! I was pleased I was able to track down Virginia and she had a clear memory of how Hot Dog Stand came to be.
- jmkni 10mo agoIt was a fun read, cheers
- caminanteblanco 10mo agoThanks for an awesome writeup! I've been reading your articles on PCGamer since highschool, and they've always been my favorite of the bunch!
- wesfenlon 10mo agoAw shucks that's nice to hear. Do not tell me how old you are because I'm not prepared for that sort of mortality introspection this afternoon.
- caminanteblanco 10mo agoJust finished college, so I'm not too long in the tooth. I remember reading your writeup on the development of Galak-Z, and liking it so much that I bought it. I'm pretty sure it was one of the first steam games I ever purchased. I didn't end up liking the game all that much, but I definitely continued to enjoy your writing!
- noveltyaccount 10mo agoI'm so glad that there's room for this kind of investigative journalism in this day and age. Kudos!
- cadr 10mo agoI'm amused she said they included it "in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow" and that "the 'Fluorescent' theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn't have a catchy name, so I've never heard anything about it." Because I loved the Fluorescent theme.
- stuaxo 10mo agoFlourescent looks so of it's time, it fits right into an age of acid house, where you could go hang out in the hologram shop [1]. [1] - E Is for Ecstacy - BBC Everyman Documentary https://youtu.be/jyrhcjRc3TU?si=Qn9qG2z8wQzD-llJ&t=812 https://youtu.be/jyrhcjRc3TU?si=Qn9qG2z8wQzD-llJ&t=812
- bombcar 10mo agoI remember playing with these or similar back then, and if you used it for awhile to just became normal.
- MontyCarloHall 10mo agoUnlike the Hot Dog Stand theme, the "Plasma Power Saver" theme also featured in the article actually was function over form, not just an aesthetic choice (or lack thereof). It was to reduce burn-in on the plasma displays of old portable computers, e.g. here [0]. [0] https://retro.swarm.cz/20170331/windows-31-running-on-ibm-ps2-p70-with-the/ https://retro.swarm.cz/20170331/windows-31-running-on-ibm-ps...
- breppp 10mo agoThis made me search and find this, screenshots of every win 3.11 theme: https://imgur.com/gallery/every-windows-3-1-theme-SsVYqM1 https://imgur.com/gallery/every-windows-3-1-theme-SsVYqM1 at least half were painfully ugly
- skydhash 10mo agoStill more readable than what Apple has released lately.
- pmdr 10mo agoWe've now seemed to have invented glass, but in some kind of a parodic form.
- Duanemclemore 10mo agoLegend. My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me. I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo agoDo you have a screenshot? That sounds unusably terrible to me, but whatever floats your boat.
- Duanemclemore 10mo agoIt's actually pretty boring. When I say "accent color" I mean a single pixel border around the selected container. The waybar is text, and the text is all bright green on a black background. The active desktop has a single pixel magenta stroke around it. I've thought about turning that into just magenta text as well. Every window element I can make #000000 black without making things more confusing is. Default text in the terminal is green, and if I select it with a mouse it's magenta. It's more of a "terminal" vibe than the win 3.1 Fluorescent vibe. I said that because they share garish colors. Also, I'm always on the lookout for even more minimalist graphics to use in my config, if anyone has hyper-minimal things they like about theirs...
- skydhash 10mo agoI’m using cwm with no bar. Just xclock and xbatt (an icon that reflect the battery percentage) in a corner. The only decoration is a border around the windows. Keyboard driven, but some menus are accessible by clicking on the desktop.
- grandchild 10mo agoAs a kid I actually used the theme on my first hand-me-down. As the regular theme. And I remember chosing it because it was fun! It made my computer more fun. At the end of the day, usability shouldn't trump fun. If I find it's less usable, I can switch back.
- theturtle 10mo agoI actually used Hot Dog Stand as the inspiration for the color combination on a big internal website years ago. A "committee" was still flapping its gums about the color choice a week before a hard launch, so I simply... decided. A moderately-unpleasant but distinctive combination went into production. I figured that would finally force them to make an actual decision after nine months of meetings. I was wrong. Users seemed to like it OK, nobody complained, so it stayed. For almost five years. I actually finally TOLD them, "you never actually decided, so I picked the colors to be deliberately a little obnoxious so you would actually get off the pot and decide." They were PISSED. Not long after, I came up with a way for users (not committees of the managers of users, who usually know nothing) to choose their own preferred colors, and over 80% of them never used that feature and left the garish original I had pulled out of my butt in 1999, because now they were used to it.
- neilv 10mo agoA non-obvious reason that I think the yellow background would've looked especially bad to people at the time, is that most people doing non-gaming on PCs at the time were using MS-DOS programs in text mode, with 4&3-bit color, where it was very unusual for the background color to be bright. (It was technically possible to get a bright background color on PCs in text mode, but very few programs did that.)
- homeonthemtn 10mo agoBack in my day, changing the windows color pallets was the only form of video game we had. And we liked it!