16 ms·

Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

710 points by adunk 5mo ago

BoredPositron 5mo ago
That brings back memories from pre press days and the SGI Indigo machines. They did some heavy lifting for the time.
andsoitis 5mo ago
Year of release for each would be extra awesome.
- deleted 5mo ago
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tomhow 5mo ago
Previously: Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 - June 2023 (55 comments) Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 - Dec 2017 (58 comments)
grebc 5mo ago
Amazing resource!
deleted 5mo ago
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lynndotpy 5mo ago
I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
- keyle 5mo ago
  Irix 5 was so clean!
  - doublerabbit 5mo ago
    QNX too, I awe to that vision of the world.
Terr_ 5mo ago
> DECWindows > /tmp/med_16.sixel ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? If so, then that's certainly a very different way of feeling old than I expected when clicking the link. P.S.: There's another in "RiscOS 3.71", and "System V Release 4 Amiga Version 1.1" references Penny Arcade. [0] [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch# https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch#
- deleted 5mo ago
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- lproven 5mo ago
  > ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? Yes it is. I still read the comic, but it is very strange and unpleasant, really actively nasty, now: currently it's in an arc of why Jews are behind all the world's problems, and how Hitler was good really. I am sort of staring in daily horrified fascination. It's like a slow-motion catastrophic road crash. What the hell happened to a Japanese American to turn them full Nazi? I mean like real "the Germans were wronged, they had the right idea" Nazi?
barrenko 5mo ago
"We have learned nothing in 10,000 years."
- WalterGR 5mo ago
  I don’t see any pie menus, so I’m leaning towards agreement...
  - mananaysiempre 5mo ago
    Patents are very good at stifling progress and learning, even bogus ones.
- grebc 5mo ago
  Probably more accurately 40-45 years.
yjftsjthsd-h 5mo ago
It's funny how early some things do and don't look familiar. A decent chunk of unix-family OSs have changed some since then, but also kinda not. CDE 1.0 looks almost exactly like the latest version:)
giamma 5mo ago
No mention of GeOS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks
- walrus01 5mo ago
  Or GS/OS for the Apple IIgs, the weird "not exactly Mac OS" GUI.
- cout 5mo ago
  There is the 16-bit Geoworks Ensemble (PC/GEOS), at least.
  - lproven 5mo ago
    Which is FOSS now! https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
- themadturk 5mo ago
  That was my first GUI, on the Commodore 64 with RAM expansion (don't remember if I had the 128kb or 256kb expansion). I wrote and laid out my user group newsletter on GeoPublish. I felt like I was running a Mac.
- pjmlp 5mo ago
  I only know it existed because on Portugal, Phillips had an option to ship GeoWorks instead of Windows on their PCs, and a guy on our class was very adamant defending it.
bsdooby 5mo ago
Even the site with its NeXTStep style (love it).
jchw 5mo ago
Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/ http://toastytech.com/guis/ At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.
- lproven 5mo ago
  ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is. https://guidebookgallery.org/ https://guidebookgallery.org/
  - teddyh 5mo ago
    More: • <https://ui.codexpanse.com/ https://ui.codexpanse.com/> • <https://history.vpon.me/ https://history.vpon.me/>
    - culi 5mo ago
      Not for OS's specifically but this site is fascinating for examining diverse HUDs and GUIs https://www.hudsandguis.com/ https://www.hudsandguis.com/
  - plun9 5mo ago
    http://nixon-development.com/guis http://nixon-development.com/guis
    - lproven 5mo ago
      Thanks! Is it me or do 3/4 of the pages not load any images? The title took me a moment to work out. I suppose it was written by someone who speaks in an accent where "OS-some" sounds like "awesome". It does not to me. It was 20 or 30 years after the last time I saw a Hauppuage TV card that I saw an explanation of how it's meant to be pronounced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauppauge_Computer_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauppauge_Computer_Works Then some years later, I mentioned this to someone, and he said it aloud and I realised that my mental effort to pronounce "HAWP-og" was completely wrong. To me, it sounds something more like "whore-porg".
jeffreygoesto 5mo ago
https://networkencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/netware.gif https://networkencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/n...
mananaysiempre 5mo ago
Where did the author get a copy of pre-X-integration NeWS, I wonder (if indeed they did). I haven’t been able to locate one online after a lot of determined searching, but I also can’t bring myself to declare that there isn’t one because the name is so ungoogleable.
- pell 5mo ago
  Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet? https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/
  - mananaysiempre 5mo ago
    I have now, but (especially with the article part of the website now killed in favour of the execrable Medium) it took 'DVRC’s reply above for me to realize there was more to it than it first appeared: besides https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/ there’s also https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/ (take care that the news-tape subdirectory of the former is very similar but not identical to the latter) and most notably https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/ (these are not identical either), while the correct place to look on Bitsavers is https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/ https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/
    - DVRC 5mo ago
      Fun fact: originally "/home/NeWS" displayed "forbidden" access and I stumbled upon it by pure luck, finding the missing "operators.h" (and I told Don, since I wanted to see if there was something else missing or different, like "DumbOSI.c" which I hoped to be different from SunOSI.c). There is also an hidden file in /lib/NeWS called ".NeWS", contains the following string: "(hello) playdemo", which should kick the journal tool. In any case, it was a "Pulcinella Secret", and anybody reading his replies on HN could easily find all his distributions, and it is replicated also on tenox.pdp-11.ru (but it's incomplete, since that there are only the contents of /home/code/NeWS". On BitSavers there are the OpenWindows 2.0 source tapes other than the binaries (these last ones are also available inside SunOS 4.1.1 install CD, both for Sun-3 and Sun-4), but to extract them you need a specific tool, then you extract the tar dists.
darkwater 5mo ago
Let's talk about the HP-9000 as depicted in http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-ux7-color-ch.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-u... There is a `man` entry displayed in a terminal window there. The first Unix I've ever touched was HP-UX on an HP-9000 (server series, not the workstation one), and I have this memory that the underlined words you can see in that manpage as well were actually hyperlinks you can select and would bring you to the relevant section of the manpage that discussed that term. Am I fabricating that memory or is it real? I cannot find any info about it on the Internet.
- yread 5mo ago
  I thought only `info` had hyperlinks
  - darkwater 5mo ago
    In the GNU world, indeed. And that's why it makes even harder for me to remember exactly, it was 30 years ago, I was clueless and also Linux was already "big enough" to have some Red Hat installed in some x86 PC in the same lab.
- aa-jv 5mo ago
  My 'first Unix' was MIPS Risc/OS, and it had that feature too.
- jll29 5mo ago
  I started with HP-UX 9.03 on a PA-RISC-powered 715-75 (to use Emacs, our whole research group logged into the 735 server to edit there, which was faster than running it locally). Any unclean pointer fiddling in C, and the process was terminated by the OS, so the machine was wonderful to use as a development box (especially with Purify installed) for software that would later be run on Windows or Linux. I eventually bought my own refurbished (and using academic discount) 715 (instead of a car), so I had the fastest machine in our student dorm of anyone I knew, undergrad, grad student or professor. I could just write my Master's thesis when everyone else kept re-installing Windows - the HP never crashed in 6.5 years, which has left me with deep respect for the old-schol (pre-Compaq) HP engineers. The machine (21" color CRT) occupied half of my 9 square metre dorm room, but it also kept me warm.
vladsiu 5mo ago
[dead]
inatreecrown2 5mo ago
What a wonderful resource! HP VUE has interesting color choices and a nice "Dock"
pedrogpimenta 5mo ago
This is like porn for me :) It's one of my favourite things, looking at and analyzing older interfaces. Some are lovely, some are cute, some are ugly, but most are... "naïve"? I love to think about the effort, the research, the trials and tribulations. I feel I will spend a great deal of time in this page!
- repelsteeltje 5mo ago
  > [..] lovely [..] cute [..] ugly [..] naive... First and foremost to me those screenshots are somewhat disappointing as they can't match my memories. NeXT, BeOS, Irix, OpenLook, SunOS, Arthur (imagine the diversity)... they were SO awesomely impressive at insanely high multi-sync CRT resolution. Reality simply can't match the mind's eye, at least not for me.
  - Keyframe 5mo ago
    I was thinking exactly the same. IRIX on a great Sony CRT is still awesome to just look at, to this day (I have _few_ SGIs). HP Vue, Solaris.. the greats. One that does seem to be an odd man out is Genera. What a concept.
oniony 5mo ago
I love how little df has changed since 1985.
livinglist 5mo ago
Sometime I wish time goes slower
aidos 5mo ago
Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard. For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.
- whynotmaybe 5mo ago
  Nothing beats a 40 year nostalgia in the morning! Except missing that sock and falling down into the dog's path and understanding the concept of fighting like cats and dogs. I just found out that the theme song is on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)
xnorswap 5mo ago
This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years. Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.
- adrianwaj 5mo ago
  I am starting to think the top half of the screen should be the desktop, the bottom half should be the start menu but already activated and full of programs. No conventional bottom panel-bar with a start button. A right-most column should exist that fills up with a list of opened windows. [1] When I first saw Win95 with a cleared desktop, I immediately thought - where has everything gone? Why is this empty? Decades later I still think it's cumbersome to have to look and press at bottom left to see all the programs every time. [1] proportions and locations can be set Also, a "sweep" button that quickly clears the desktop into a "desktop archive." I do that manually anyway with my own "sweep" folders. Every few months I delete and categorize within the sweep folder. Keeping the desktop clean and organized is the new frontier, especially as screens become smaller and people don't want to lose flow. Verbose response, but what are your thoughts? Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify? Mice and keyboards are just so passe, right, but I wouldn't go so far as getting a brain chip? Maybe a spherical "touchball" that senses the pressure of each finger to move a cursor? Trackballs are too laborsome. I have my mouse on maximum sensitivity and acceleration anyway.
  - pjc50 5mo ago
    Screen real estate is precious unless on the very largest screens. Especially vertical. I'm a big fan of being able to put the app list/bar on the right, keeping the maximum vertical space available and allowing its captions to be readable horizontally. > Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify? This feels like the result of a competition to design the worst possible user interface. To about 5% of people it might be an accessibility feature, to everyone else it's worse, and people with beards, marks, or dark skinned faces are going to find it a disaster.
jll29 5mo ago
My favorites: GEM + Ventura Publisher http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1.1.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1.... Viewpoint http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-pce.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p... AUX http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+. It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered. Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.
bronlund 5mo ago
I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs. > in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
  - andai 5mo ago
    Chesterton's fence! Don't delete something unless you know why it's there in the first place.
  - abanana 5mo ago
    > Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn. It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
    - exe34 5mo ago
redbell 5mo ago
I miss the old days. Thirty years ago, 64MB of RAM was considered a thing (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.install.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.in...)
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  With the way RAM prices are going we aren't far from that.
- bitwize 5mo ago
  Wait till you see the UI the Amiga could run in 1 measly MiB of RAM. You could even run a sophisticated shell, multitasked along with everything else.
sthuck 5mo ago
I kinda miss that in the early 2000's kde and gnome shipped with a fuck ton of window decorations based on all those (then-not-so) old OS. Teenager me had fun switching them every day and playing with windowing behavior (focus follows mouse! hover to select and only one click needed!). I wonder what techy kids today do to explore and have fun. Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.
- eloisant 5mo ago
  Even before those, AfterStep, Enlightenment and many others were really nice.
- somat 5mo ago
  In some ways X11 with it's focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus, select:middle click paste features provide a far more refined desktop experience then mac or windows ever could. No wait, stop laughing, sure X11 was a garbage fire when it came to consistent professional design, but because it was such a wild west of an environment there was place for real ui innovation. I know, I get grumpy fast without middle click paste. And I hate having to raise a window in order to click and type on it(A common access pattern for me is to read docs on the top window while I am operating the bottom window).
  - lstodd 5mo ago
    Cut-buffer (the middle click) I just can't live without. People that never experienced that still get awestruck with the ease and effortlessness. And virtual desktops/workspaces also had that awe-effect back then. Although with multimonitor setups this faded a bit.
- hermitcrab 5mo ago
  Yes Aqua was quite striking. Also much more consistent than the rag bag of different styling you see on Windows or Mac today.
theletterf 5mo ago
I love old desktop OSes so much I've created a Windows 3.1 theme for mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295
logotype 5mo ago
Deeply nostalgic! Thanks for sharing.
arionmiles 5mo ago
For anyone pining for innovation in Desktop, a small part of this culture is still alive in Ricing competitions. A recent favorite of mine is this one. Timestamp starts at the final submission being reviewed: https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557 https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557
zargath 5mo ago
great list, would be cool to see each OS evolving over time. NextStep/OSX was the only desktop OS that did not feel like a downgrade from Amiga Workbench
daneel_w 5mo ago
I'm sure someone reading this thread has UAE handy in order to contribute a screenshot of AmigaOS/Workbench 1.x.
- abanana 5mo ago
  Regarding Amiga screenshots, they've taken care to get the DigiPaint aspect ratios right, but the Workbench 2.04 screenshot is in a resolution that comes from an add-in graphics card rather than the Amiga's custom chips. It's a resolution Workbench wasn't graphically designed for, so it looked wrong in such a resolution at the time. If you double the screenshot's height, then everything (text, icons, window gadgets etc) looks right. It would be more representative of the OS, and the era, to have a height-doubled "HiRes" screenshot, 640x200 or 640x256.
  - daneel_w 5mo ago
    The aspect ratio is correct on all screenshots and are accurate de-interlaced representations of a 640x400/512 workbench setup, even though these particular screenshots are in RTG dimensions. Starting with ECS, the Amiga was also capable of true non-interlaced 640x400 output (and even 480 vertical lines unless I misremember) in what was commonly called "productivity mode", limited to 4 colors (2 bitplanes). Interlaced workbench setups weren't uncommon. I ran such on and off for years for certain productivity stuff where I wanted more screen real estate, until I decided to spend money on a flicker-fixer.
    - abanana 5mo ago
      > The aspect ratio is correct Yes it is, was my post unclear? Following your suggestion that someone might contribute a screenshot of 1.x, which I agree would be a nice addition, I'm suggesting a "HiRes" screenshot of 2.x or 3.x would be a better representation of how it looked in-period to the vast majority of users. The point is just that the icons, text, and general UI chrome were designed for that lower vertical resolution. I ran the interlaced modes later after buying a flicker-fixer, but didn't know of anyone who used them without one - the flicker meant those interlaced modes weren't generally considered to be very usable.
andrewstuart 5mo ago
The Cambrian period of operating systems and GUIs.
FergusArgyll 5mo ago
There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better? To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever
- hermitcrab 5mo ago
  There is definitely an element of nostalgia. However, a lot of earlier desktop OS GUIs do seem to be more internally consistent and with more emphasis on usability than the current crop. I think part of the issue is that things that might make sense on a phone have bled into desktop OSes, where they make a lot less sense.
  - FergusArgyll 5mo ago
    I don't mean this in a dismissive way but based on your profile I'd say you're > 25. I'm curious about the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with the those os's
    - hermitcrab 5mo ago
      25 is a very distant memory. ;0)
    - funimpoded 5mo ago
      You’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use. That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.
    - skydhash 5mo ago
      I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds). Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.
piekvorst 5mo ago
No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).
- ori_b 5mo ago
  The plan 9 interface has evolved quite a bit, but it's largely invisible in screenshots. The differences are in things like triple click behavior, jumps to insertion points, effective use of mouse cursor warping, chording.
  - lproven 5mo ago
    Screenshots -- or GIFs -- of Plan 9 compared with Inferno would be most instructive. The Plan 9 folks I've talked to are a bit shocked by this, but I preferred Inferno's GUI to plain old Rio/Acme etc.
hermitcrab 5mo ago
Invisible scroll bars are a source of constant annoyance. And it sometimes takes me several attempts to move a window, because of all the various clickable things without visible boundaries. Frustrating.
- anthk 5mo ago
  On GNU/Linux run this command, it will fix it for all the GTK based desktops, such as XFCE, Gnome and Mate: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false Under Mac you might have a similar Cocoa setting or whatever is called (nsproperties?) with "defaults write".
  - hermitcrab 5mo ago
    I'm on Windows and Mac. Not because I love them, but because that is where my customers are. Also I try to keep my computers fairly vanilla, so that they don't look too different to the user's computer when I do videos or screenshots of my software.
    - elch 5mo ago
      Windows: Settings -> Accessibility -> Always show scrollbars.
      - hulitu 5mo ago
        Which is ignored by most programs.
        Aachen 5mo ago
        Report as bug. A surprising number of (commercial or open source) projects care about accessibility settings Of course, a smaller but no less surprising number of projects don't. The complexity of such a report is so low, though, that one might as well try for software that you actually use
  - 5mo ago
ahmedfromtunis 5mo ago
Can't help noticing how the interface and general mechanics of these old OSes were tightly coupled to the hardware. Both the makers and users of that era seemed to relish that vibe. I know I certainly do. However, that paradigm made computers daunting for anyone who wasn't an enthusiast. While I’m nostalgic for that level of transparency, I recognize that those hurdles stood in the way of mass adoption. We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact. THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency. Modern simplification shouldn't feel like a forced lobotomy of the OS (or any piece of software really). There’s no reason we can't have both: an interface that stays out of the way for the average user, while providing total control for power users. Whatever happened to progressive disclosure?
rschoultz 5mo ago
I distinctly remember, and found, the NeWS (Network extensible windowing sisten), where you could develop with PostScript(TM) for application windows.
- DVRC 5mo ago
  Over time much NeWS related stuff resurfaced, wheter are application binaries, sources (both application and the server itself) or documentation, so anyone could play with them on a real machine (Sun-3 or SPARC) or inside QEMU SPARC. I'm waiting for a copy of "Portable NeWS 1.0" to be recovered, to see how much different the sources are compared to the 1.1 version. I also hope to see resurface binaries/sources of other server implementations, Sun Symbolic Programming Environment (which includes code originally developed at Schlumberger, including LispScript), the sources of the PdB compiler, CMU Andrew wm (although is not directly related, is the ancestor of this window system, from the same authors), and whatever is related to this system. It would be interesting a revival like Interlisp.
q8zd3 5mo ago
I was not ready to start my day with a OS/2 Warp nostalgia feeling
shevy-java 5mo ago
GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. I first saw this on a friends' parents computer and was quite astonished why computers may look like that. I was very used to Windows/DOS back then. I am also glad to have switched to Linux in 2004 already. Once you have been using Linux for a while, whenever I use windows I am annoyed at how slow it is. Just file copy operations alone and then billion excuses windows developers make, trying to copsplain why it is so slow. When I have to backup 30GB, I don't want an explanation why it is slow - I simply use what is faster. And that's just one advantage of many more Linux has. (I use the commandline most of the time though, so KDE and GNOME are IMO just pointless eyecandy these days.)
- lproven 5mo ago
  > GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. Yes, it does. So much so that Apple noticed and sued. I gave some links in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121011
prevailrob 5mo ago
Them beOS icons were lovely at the time
- nailer 5mo ago
  God beOS is the absolute peak of pixel-based UI design. It's like what Metal Slug was for pixel art games. Someone needs to add a CRT filter button to the site.
- bitigchi 5mo ago
  Check out Haiku.
DVRC 5mo ago
The man behind this site is known for his skills of recoverying data from QIC tapes. Looking at the "Software Library" section makes me always wonder if it will be released at some point, since that there is some stuff that isn't on BitSavers or other sites.
delta_p_delta_x 5mo ago
I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.
- vbezhenar 5mo ago
  You want Linux. Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them. GUI frameworks provide features for applications to draw their UI. A selection of numerous windows managers and desktop environments allows you to choose the best GUI shell to work in. It is somewhat of a bazaar, with different components sometimes not fitting perfectly into each other and there's a constant migration to a best new thing, whether it's systemd, pulseaudio, wayland or pipewire, but generally things work OK and it's not like Windows today offers a significantly different experience. Windows is beyond salvation at this point.
  - 201984 5mo ago
    The "constant migration to a new best thing" is a big problem. Once written, a program should be able to run forever, but this is only true on Windows for GUIs and on Linux only for some CLIs. Arch just recently dropped the original vi from its repos because "it no longer compiled" with stricter GCC settings, and if you want to run an older GUI, just forget about it. It's hars to blame people for only targeting the Web or Windows when those two will work forever, but on Linux you have to keep up with the endless treadmill of X11 to Wayland, GTK 2 to 3 to 4, Qt 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, pulseaudio to pipewire, etc., and if you miss just one you may as well give up.
    - bombcar 5mo ago
      The entire existence of docker is basically because Linux is impossibly bad at maintaining old software while Windows will still run some terribly old things (though the loss of Win16 is a big one).
jhbadger 5mo ago
While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.
nickdothutton 5mo ago
Nostalgic for VAXstation/DECwindows terminals where at the time the monitor weighed more than I did.
tardedmeme 5mo ago
"403 Forbidden"
jmclnx 5mo ago
xfm from the first Slackware print, I really liked that file manager. But these days it fails to work. I tied many years ago to get it work but failed :(
vessenes 5mo ago
Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos. A nice vibe coding project here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.
- dotancohen 5mo ago
  I may have some KDE 2 and 3 screenshots to add.
  - vessenes 5mo ago
    Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.
- whartung 5mo ago
  > It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. You can't really get it from these screenshots, but I'll give an example of what you're talking about. I remember GEM when it came out, and it simply looked terrible. Not just their color choice, but simply that low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast. The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy. Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
wink 5mo ago
OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'? The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).
- WillAdams 5mo ago
  Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers. Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.
  - masfuerte 5mo ago
    RISC OS (1987) had built-in support for anti-aliased vector fonts, though they aren't shown in the screenshot. The OS was in ROM and had insufficient space for the actual fonts so they needed to be loaded from disk. This was fine if you had a hard disk but a pita with floppies.
    - WillAdams 5mo ago
      Need to find the time to try that out on a Raspberry Pi....
      - lproven 5mo ago
        You really do. It is pretty much a work of art. I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse. 2022: https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-35-but-its-still-kicking/919144 https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3... 2024: https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open-530-is-here-with-pi-wi-fi-support/307728 https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open... I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, because that's all anyone on board has seen or knows.
paulryanrogers 5mo ago
So much gray, even when the hardware could do color. Perhaps for compatibility with other hardware or get out of the way?
thrownaway561 5mo ago
where's desqview? I ran my first BBS on that back in the 90s before switching over to OS/2 Warp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
- eddieh 5mo ago
  That Wikipedia article needs a better screenshot. Otherwise, very interesting. And DESQview/X was X Window System on DOS with pre-emptive multitasking, wow.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
3form 5mo ago
It's nice to see some of these things and finally make out any contents! I've felt hurt by Wikipedia's somewhat odd and sad screenshot policy, which makes it impossible to see any details of the things I've been looking at recently, like early Windows NT.
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  They do that on purpose with proprietary apps to avoid copyright complaints.
drzaiusx11 5mo ago
No Mouse Desk [1], GEOS [2], or GS/OS [3]? Look what you did now, my Apple IIs are just crying in the corner.. 1.https://imgur.com/a/h6dxDRv https://imgur.com/a/h6dxDRv (circa 1985) 2. https://imgur.com/a/IlJSlJT https://imgur.com/a/IlJSlJT (circa 1986) 3. https://imgur.com/a/AIo3jdk https://imgur.com/a/AIo3jdk (circa 1988)
red_admiral 5mo ago
I'm struck how it used to be _almost_ universal that the active window title bar stands out visually from the other ones.
ThinkBeat 5mo ago
It is depressing how little has changed.
rfmoz 5mo ago
I miss on the list Counterpoint GUI for Amstrad PCs with MS-DOS https://www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/Counterpoint/index.html https://www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/Counterpoint/index.html
hulitu 5mo ago
All of them look much, much better than Windows 10, Windows 11, Android or iOS although all run on less powerfull hardware. But using only one level of library to draw on the screen "is so lame'. /s
pmarreck 5mo ago
Well, that was an unexpectedly emotional trip through most of my nerd life to date lol
nxobject 5mo ago
The HPC Integral PC has a fascinatingly compact design... by necessity.
systems 5mo ago
No https version of this site, I configured my browser to warn or block non https websites, since from my experience few of those tried to force download (what i can only assume to be viruses) to my computer I understand that https can do that to, but its usually the none https that does, so its a decent configuration to have Please consider making the site https
noashavit 5mo ago
Anyone here remember dos? The og CLI bases OS
- lproven 5mo ago
  I offer a modern distro of a DOS. :-) So yes. https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
delfugal 5mo ago
Nice walk through history. So many people trying to be the next big thing.
RRRA 5mo ago
Surprised Enlightenment didn't make the cut while fvwm is there
headgasket 5mo ago
in 30 years someone will do this with LLMs
rawgabbit 5mo ago
I was still in school when OS/2 came out. I read about it in the magazines never touching it myself. I was impressed with its aesthetics but never knew with the clout of IBM why it never took off. My guess is internal politics killed OS/2 more than Microsoft?
- mikestew 5mo ago
  Internal politics, yeah, maybe; because IBM certainly didn’t do much to market it. That, and bundling deals Microsoft had with OEM hardware vendors (if you want the discount, then Windows has to go on every machine). OS/2 advertised a “better Windows than Windows”. Problem was, software vendors then said, “great, now we don’t have to do an OS/2 port!”
  - rawgabbit 5mo ago
    Yes. But with IBM’s war chest at the time, it could have undercut anything Microsoft offered.
zhxiaoliang 5mo ago
Seeing these brought back a flood of memories. Logging onto AOL through GeoWorks for the first time. Clicking that tiny lit apartment window in the Macintosh mouse tutorial and watching the curtain peel back to reveal a couple dancing inside. Mesmerized by the soft shade on OS/2 buttons like they were works of art (yes, I know that’s weird). Bringing my NeXTstation into the office when I was just a lowly game tester and getting that look from my boss. Those really were magical days.
chiffre01 5mo ago
Try this out for all of KDE to CDE window theming needs: https://github.com/spacestate1/cde-plasma https://github.com/spacestate1/cde-plasma
- space_ghost 5mo ago
  Here's a good starting point for those of us that use XFCE: https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1231025/ https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1231025/
faefox 5mo ago
The BeOS aesthetic has aged so well. I'll always wonder what might've been had they not been deliberately smothered in the crib (or at the very least if Apple had chosen to acquire them).
pdntspa 5mo ago
I hated magenta-blue CGA graphics soooo sooo much as a kid. It was (and still is IMHO) the ugliest thing I ever saw on a computer, by far. I had a monitor that had a switch in the back that would change those colors to red-yellow-green. It was still awful but at least it was less awful than white-magenta-blue
liendolucas 5mo ago
NextStep interface still looks sleek and timeless. No doubt a decaying Apple went to acquire them. Having seen some NextStep demos online, it was way ahead of its time. Few weeks ago just started to use WindowMaker again on one of my VMs.
- felixding 5mo ago
  Absolutely! I wish projects like nextspace could get more love.
sandbach 5mo ago
Compare https://deskto.ps/ https://deskto.ps/
hilti 5mo ago
Thank you so much for this link :-) I'm studying old operating systems, because it's very interesting how we've been so productive with less screen pixels than we have today. It's basically mind blowing that 800x600 pixels have been a long time enough to get work done. Currently I'm typing this on an iPhone 17 with a larger screen and after all the years there is nothing like a good charting, dashboarding or spreadsheet on it.
unixhero 5mo ago
Impressive collection
LetsGetTechnicl 5mo ago
It's not listed here and maybe I'm just nostalgic for the computer labs from elementary/middle school but Windows 2000 was so peak
- zoeysmithe 5mo ago
  I think the NT4/2000 desktop was pretty perfect. It laid down everything without getting in your way. A lot of early systems were forced to follow simplicity because of lack of resources. This coincidentally led to better interfaces because complexity is difficult to get right and often is in service of business interests instead of technical interests. I think its obvious that there's a degradation in business products as they age. They become more 'competitive' which means more profit-seeking, so the marketing end of things takes over and the engineering end takes a back seat. Simplicity is replaced with shiny and complexity to catch more edge case sales. Weird cargo cults emerge, product manager cults of personality, etc instead of following proper usability guidelines. Industry fads become self-fulfilling prophecies. Lockdowns and walled gardens emerge because they are more profitable than open systems. Today, I almost can't believe how hostile and bloaty Windows 11 is and MacOS isn't much better. At least we have FOSS, but the commercial end of things is 'late stage' and frankly awful. There's a real tragedy how capitalism always leads here. I sometimes wonder if the USSR stuck around what a more technocratic-led system would produce compared to the West.
morkalork 5mo ago
Is that an illustration of the Canadian museum of history made in Corel Draw I spy?
thomasswift 5mo ago
That beos yellow..
procflora 5mo ago
VUE was so excellent looking it makes me want to run CDE today.
jedberg 5mo ago
I miss my GEM desktop and products. They were so ahead of their time. And Ventura publisher! I made some school projects using that. Brings back some good memories.
loph 5mo ago
That page does not include VMS DECwindows Motif, so here is a link: https://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/OpenVMS.html https://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/OpenVMS.html VMS DECwindows Motif 1.0 was released in August 1991; it is difficult for me to comprehend that was 35(!) years ago. I still have a mouse pad from the release party.
- floren 5mo ago
  There is the very similar Ultrix version: http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5-mips.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5...
herf 5mo ago
The aspect ratios were much "taller" back then, which was kind of better for editing code. All these late 90s designs were near NTSC at the time - aspect ratios like 1.25:1 (1280x1024) or 1024x768 (1.33:1). Monitors have always followed TVs, since displays now are the "HD" ratio of 16:9 (1.77:1), or 16:10 if we're lucky. But we do get way more pixels now anyway.
- tom_ 5mo ago
  Use portrait displays! You'll never complain about the height again. Use 1440p (or scaled equivalent) and the width won't be an issue either. Many displays make this easy (all the Dells I've had can rotate), and adequate rotating stands aren't necessarily expensive. There's even maybe some Actual Scientific Evidence to justify the switch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638928
armcat 5mo ago
Sun Solaris PPC (CDE) takes me back. I've built plenty of 3G/WCDMA telephony code on that thing. It never let me down.
zuzululu 5mo ago
im just scrolling through these while I prepare for a VC pitch session and I realize these UI are actually pretty darn good ? Like the old Windows 98 UI (probably biased) to me just handles so much, why can't apps just look like that? Its boring sure but there's no complexity or inferred action there like modern apps ? Why do seniors struggle to use modern mobile phones but in those days they could easily work through those UIs? Just some ranting here but it's shockingly better than what I have currently on Mac
- gmmachine 5mo ago
  Interesting take. Having said that, did you ever try and use workbench in Amiga? Yet, I remember being around in the 90s and helping seniors navigate Windows98. While it was Windows 98 offered an easier UI/UX than 3.1, was it really superior over the UI/UX of modern interfaces and application design? I too dislike Mac interfaces, and think that KDE is likely the best UI ever. While on KDE, lets include the also German, and now discontinued, YaST over Windows98 control panel!
petemill 5mo ago
Risc OS is the GOAT
gmmachine 5mo ago
I live for Old UNIX screenshots, you just made my day, my week, my month ... ok my year! Thanks! I also love to collect old xpm icons from that era, and try and assemble arcane FVWM configs that weave them in. Oh, NsCDE is a great start if anyone wants to emulate some of the Solaris screenshots in the collection. http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5-mips.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5... <-- XV! I used that back in the day. Does anyone remember gv too? GhostView? Another great Motif application for pdf documents. Reviewing the screenshots here, I realize profoundly that something about the idealism of the 1990s is baked into them; the 1990s a time before the bad vibes of commercialism mostly destroyed the interwebs.
Quitschquat 5mo ago
You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
- mc32 5mo ago
  No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.
  - Quitschquat 5mo ago
    Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.
    - HerbManic 5mo ago
      Yeah some of them just ran bad even on fully speced systems. The vision of the software was far beyond the hardware for a long while.
      - trunkiedozer 5mo ago
        The network is the computer.
    - lproven 5mo ago
      Relevant: "Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes" (May 4, 2026) https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxes/ https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxe...
    - saltcured 5mo ago
      Heh, I still remember how, as undergrads, we thought we all wanted those "pizza box" workstations that grad student were using. But when I was assigned an Ultra (1?) workstation at my first full-time job, I found that it was a better user and development experience to ignore it and use Linux on my Dell notebook, which I think was a Pentium MMX running somewhere around 200 MHz.
rob-olmos 5mo ago
Lifestreams was also an interesting take on a desktop UI back in the day
- cachius 5mo ago
  [flagged]
rsolva 5mo ago
I remember using some kind of software around the time of windows xp i think, that could replace the chrome/shell so you could design your own GUI entirely – but I can't remember what it was called! I spent a lot of time iterating and experimenting back then, replacing iexplore.exe or whatever the main process was called.
- yapfrog 5mo ago
  Resource Hacker?
- junto 5mo ago
  Are you thinking of WindowBlinds / Stardock? https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/ https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/ I seem to remember it was available at the same time as the Winamp skins / viz craze.
ntnsndr 5mo ago
It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other! System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.
- metaltyphoon 5mo ago
  +1. The idea of making tiling + floating a first class citizen was the best decision they made.
kemist 5mo ago
What wonderful memories, have a vivid one of working on a computer at Kinkos using the old System 7 (Mac OS 8) UI. Thanks :)
watersb 5mo ago
So happy to have been along for that ride. This collection is a great complement to the everything-x86 PC workstation jungle of the day. I built a huge tower PC server to run NeXTStep in 1993, but I had no idea how difficult hardware comparability would be. It was a journey. But things improved quickly. So I installed lots of these: OS/2, Windows NT, NextStep, BeOS, Linux, various BSDs. I found a Computer Shopper from that time. I'm pretty sure I bought one of the tower cases from page 786. Great stuff. Tell them I sent you! https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-march-1993/ https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-march-1993/
__del__ 5mo ago
>you'll dance to anything by toad the wet sprocket. loser. love a good screenshot easter egg
felixsebastian 5mo ago
I was looking for Atari TOS

710 points by adunk 5mo ago

BoredPositron 5mo ago

That brings back memories from pre press days and the SGI Indigo machines. They did some heavy lifting for the time.

andsoitis 5mo ago

Year of release for each would be extra awesome.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

tomhow 5mo ago

Previously: Historical workstation desktop interface screenshots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191713 - June 2023 (55 comments) Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968745 - Dec 2017 (58 comments)

grebc 5mo ago

Amazing resource!

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

lynndotpy 5mo ago

I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

keyle 5mo ago
Irix 5 was so clean!
- doublerabbit 5mo ago
  QNX too, I awe to that vision of the world.

Terr_ 5mo ago

> DECWindows > /tmp/med_16.sixel ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? If so, then that's certainly a very different way of feeling old than I expected when clicking the link. P.S.: There's another in "RiscOS 3.71", and "System V Release 4 Amiga Version 1.1" references Penny Arcade. [0] [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch# https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05/the-merch#

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
lproven 5mo ago
> ... Is that Sinfest? From before the author went weird? Yes it is. I still read the comic, but it is very strange and unpleasant, really actively nasty, now: currently it's in an arc of why Jews are behind all the world's problems, and how Hitler was good really. I am sort of staring in daily horrified fascination. It's like a slow-motion catastrophic road crash. What the hell happened to a Japanese American to turn them full Nazi? I mean like real "the Germans were wronged, they had the right idea" Nazi?

barrenko 5mo ago

"We have learned nothing in 10,000 years."

WalterGR 5mo ago
I don’t see any pie menus, so I’m leaning towards agreement...
- mananaysiempre 5mo ago
  Patents are very good at stifling progress and learning, even bogus ones.
grebc 5mo ago
Probably more accurately 40-45 years.

yjftsjthsd-h 5mo ago

It's funny how early some things do and don't look familiar. A decent chunk of unix-family OSs have changed some since then, but also kinda not. CDE 1.0 looks almost exactly like the latest version:)

giamma 5mo ago

No mention of GeOS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks

walrus01 5mo ago
Or GS/OS for the Apple IIgs, the weird "not exactly Mac OS" GUI.
cout 5mo ago
There is the 16-bit Geoworks Ensemble (PC/GEOS), at least.
- lproven 5mo ago
  Which is FOSS now! https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
themadturk 5mo ago
That was my first GUI, on the Commodore 64 with RAM expansion (don't remember if I had the 128kb or 256kb expansion). I wrote and laid out my user group newsletter on GeoPublish. I felt like I was running a Mac.
pjmlp 5mo ago
I only know it existed because on Portugal, Phillips had an option to ship GeoWorks instead of Windows on their PCs, and a guy on our class was very adamant defending it.

bsdooby 5mo ago

Even the site with its NeXTStep style (love it).

jchw 5mo ago

Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/ http://toastytech.com/guis/ At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.

lproven 5mo ago
ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is. https://guidebookgallery.org/ https://guidebookgallery.org/
- teddyh 5mo ago
  More: • <https://ui.codexpanse.com/ https://ui.codexpanse.com/> • <https://history.vpon.me/ https://history.vpon.me/>
  - culi 5mo ago
    Not for OS's specifically but this site is fascinating for examining diverse HUDs and GUIs https://www.hudsandguis.com/ https://www.hudsandguis.com/
- plun9 5mo ago
  http://nixon-development.com/guis http://nixon-development.com/guis
  - lproven 5mo ago
    Thanks! Is it me or do 3/4 of the pages not load any images? The title took me a moment to work out. I suppose it was written by someone who speaks in an accent where "OS-some" sounds like "awesome". It does not to me. It was 20 or 30 years after the last time I saw a Hauppuage TV card that I saw an explanation of how it's meant to be pronounced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauppauge_Computer_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauppauge_Computer_Works Then some years later, I mentioned this to someone, and he said it aloud and I realised that my mental effort to pronounce "HAWP-og" was completely wrong. To me, it sounds something more like "whore-porg".

jeffreygoesto 5mo ago

https://networkencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/netware.gif https://networkencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/n...

mananaysiempre 5mo ago

Where did the author get a copy of pre-X-integration NeWS, I wonder (if indeed they did). I haven’t been able to locate one online after a lot of determined searching, but I also can’t bring myself to declare that there isn’t one because the name is so ungoogleable.

pell 5mo ago
Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet? https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/
- mananaysiempre 5mo ago
  I have now, but (especially with the article part of the website now killed in favour of the execrable Medium) it took 'DVRC’s reply above for me to realize there was more to it than it first appeared: besides https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/ there’s also https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/ (take care that the news-tape subdirectory of the former is very similar but not identical to the latter) and most notably https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/NeWS/ (these are not identical either), while the correct place to look on Bitsavers is https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/ https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/sunDistributionTapes/
  - DVRC 5mo ago
    Fun fact: originally "/home/NeWS" displayed "forbidden" access and I stumbled upon it by pure luck, finding the missing "operators.h" (and I told Don, since I wanted to see if there was something else missing or different, like "DumbOSI.c" which I hoped to be different from SunOSI.c). There is also an hidden file in /lib/NeWS called ".NeWS", contains the following string: "(hello) playdemo", which should kick the journal tool. In any case, it was a "Pulcinella Secret", and anybody reading his replies on HN could easily find all his distributions, and it is replicated also on tenox.pdp-11.ru (but it's incomplete, since that there are only the contents of /home/code/NeWS". On BitSavers there are the OpenWindows 2.0 source tapes other than the binaries (these last ones are also available inside SunOS 4.1.1 install CD, both for Sun-3 and Sun-4), but to extract them you need a specific tool, then you extract the tar dists.

darkwater 5mo ago

Let's talk about the HP-9000 as depicted in http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-ux7-color-ch.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/hpwindows-starbase-u... There is a `man` entry displayed in a terminal window there. The first Unix I've ever touched was HP-UX on an HP-9000 (server series, not the workstation one), and I have this memory that the underlined words you can see in that manpage as well were actually hyperlinks you can select and would bring you to the relevant section of the manpage that discussed that term. Am I fabricating that memory or is it real? I cannot find any info about it on the Internet.

yread 5mo ago
I thought only `info` had hyperlinks
- darkwater 5mo ago
  In the GNU world, indeed. And that's why it makes even harder for me to remember exactly, it was 30 years ago, I was clueless and also Linux was already "big enough" to have some Red Hat installed in some x86 PC in the same lab.
aa-jv 5mo ago
My 'first Unix' was MIPS Risc/OS, and it had that feature too.
jll29 5mo ago
I started with HP-UX 9.03 on a PA-RISC-powered 715-75 (to use Emacs, our whole research group logged into the 735 server to edit there, which was faster than running it locally). Any unclean pointer fiddling in C, and the process was terminated by the OS, so the machine was wonderful to use as a development box (especially with Purify installed) for software that would later be run on Windows or Linux. I eventually bought my own refurbished (and using academic discount) 715 (instead of a car), so I had the fastest machine in our student dorm of anyone I knew, undergrad, grad student or professor. I could just write my Master's thesis when everyone else kept re-installing Windows - the HP never crashed in 6.5 years, which has left me with deep respect for the old-schol (pre-Compaq) HP engineers. The machine (21" color CRT) occupied half of my 9 square metre dorm room, but it also kept me warm.

vladsiu 5mo ago

[dead]

inatreecrown2 5mo ago

What a wonderful resource! HP VUE has interesting color choices and a nice "Dock"

pedrogpimenta 5mo ago

This is like porn for me :) It's one of my favourite things, looking at and analyzing older interfaces. Some are lovely, some are cute, some are ugly, but most are... "naïve"? I love to think about the effort, the research, the trials and tribulations. I feel I will spend a great deal of time in this page!

repelsteeltje 5mo ago
> [..] lovely [..] cute [..] ugly [..] naive... First and foremost to me those screenshots are somewhat disappointing as they can't match my memories. NeXT, BeOS, Irix, OpenLook, SunOS, Arthur (imagine the diversity)... they were SO awesomely impressive at insanely high multi-sync CRT resolution. Reality simply can't match the mind's eye, at least not for me.
- Keyframe 5mo ago
  I was thinking exactly the same. IRIX on a great Sony CRT is still awesome to just look at, to this day (I have _few_ SGIs). HP Vue, Solaris.. the greats. One that does seem to be an odd man out is Genera. What a concept.

oniony 5mo ago

I love how little df has changed since 1985.

livinglist 5mo ago

Sometime I wish time goes slower

aidos 5mo ago

Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard. For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.

whynotmaybe 5mo ago
Nothing beats a 40 year nostalgia in the morning! Except missing that sock and falling down into the dog's path and understanding the concept of fighting like cats and dogs. I just found out that the theme song is on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)

xnorswap 5mo ago

This leaves me kind of sad, that we've had such little innovation in desktop / window-managers for 30 years. Certainly it doesn't feel any easier to manage multiple windows than when we had a quarter of the screen space.

adrianwaj 5mo ago
I am starting to think the top half of the screen should be the desktop, the bottom half should be the start menu but already activated and full of programs. No conventional bottom panel-bar with a start button. A right-most column should exist that fills up with a list of opened windows. [1] When I first saw Win95 with a cleared desktop, I immediately thought - where has everything gone? Why is this empty? Decades later I still think it's cumbersome to have to look and press at bottom left to see all the programs every time. [1] proportions and locations can be set Also, a "sweep" button that quickly clears the desktop into a "desktop archive." I do that manually anyway with my own "sweep" folders. Every few months I delete and categorize within the sweep folder. Keeping the desktop clean and organized is the new frontier, especially as screens become smaller and people don't want to lose flow. Verbose response, but what are your thoughts? Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify? Mice and keyboards are just so passe, right, but I wouldn't go so far as getting a brain chip? Maybe a spherical "touchball" that senses the pressure of each finger to move a cursor? Trackballs are too laborsome. I have my mouse on maximum sensitivity and acceleration anyway.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  Screen real estate is precious unless on the very largest screens. Especially vertical. I'm a big fan of being able to put the app list/bar on the right, keeping the maximum vertical space available and allowing its captions to be readable horizontally. > Maybe use voice recognition that uses lip-reading through a camera to launch or modify? This feels like the result of a competition to design the worst possible user interface. To about 5% of people it might be an accessibility feature, to everyone else it's worse, and people with beards, marks, or dark skinned faces are going to find it a disaster.

jll29 5mo ago

My favorites: GEM + Ventura Publisher http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1.1.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/ventura-publisher-1.... Viewpoint http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-pce.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/6085-viewpoint-2.0-p... AUX http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/aux-3.0.1.png It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+. It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered. Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.

bronlund 5mo ago

I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.

pjc50 5mo ago
Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs. > in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
- andai 5mo ago
  Chesterton's fence! Don't delete something unless you know why it's there in the first place.
- abanana 5mo ago
  > Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn. It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
  - exe34 5mo ago

redbell 5mo ago

I miss the old days. Thirty years ago, 64MB of RAM was considered a thing (http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.install.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/winnt-4.0-ppc-new.in...)

zozbot234 5mo ago
With the way RAM prices are going we aren't far from that.
bitwize 5mo ago
Wait till you see the UI the Amiga could run in 1 measly MiB of RAM. You could even run a sophisticated shell, multitasked along with everything else.

sthuck 5mo ago

I kinda miss that in the early 2000's kde and gnome shipped with a fuck ton of window decorations based on all those (then-not-so) old OS. Teenager me had fun switching them every day and playing with windowing behavior (focus follows mouse! hover to select and only one click needed!). I wonder what techy kids today do to explore and have fun. Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.

eloisant 5mo ago
Even before those, AfterStep, Enlightenment and many others were really nice.
somat 5mo ago
In some ways X11 with it's focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus, select:middle click paste features provide a far more refined desktop experience then mac or windows ever could. No wait, stop laughing, sure X11 was a garbage fire when it came to consistent professional design, but because it was such a wild west of an environment there was place for real ui innovation. I know, I get grumpy fast without middle click paste. And I hate having to raise a window in order to click and type on it(A common access pattern for me is to read docs on the top window while I am operating the bottom window).
- lstodd 5mo ago
  Cut-buffer (the middle click) I just can't live without. People that never experienced that still get awestruck with the ease and effortlessness. And virtual desktops/workspaces also had that awe-effect back then. Although with multimonitor setups this faded a bit.
hermitcrab 5mo ago
Yes Aqua was quite striking. Also much more consistent than the rag bag of different styling you see on Windows or Mac today.

theletterf 5mo ago

I love old desktop OSes so much I've created a Windows 3.1 theme for mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909295

logotype 5mo ago

Deeply nostalgic! Thanks for sharing.

arionmiles 5mo ago

For anyone pining for innovation in Desktop, a small part of this culture is still alive in Ricing competitions. A recent favorite of mine is this one. Timestamp starts at the final submission being reviewed: https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557 https://youtu.be/DxEKF0cuEzc?si=mqE_2vpKDBsMWlKW&t=557

zargath 5mo ago

great list, would be cool to see each OS evolving over time. NextStep/OSX was the only desktop OS that did not feel like a downgrade from Amiga Workbench

daneel_w 5mo ago

I'm sure someone reading this thread has UAE handy in order to contribute a screenshot of AmigaOS/Workbench 1.x.

abanana 5mo ago
Regarding Amiga screenshots, they've taken care to get the DigiPaint aspect ratios right, but the Workbench 2.04 screenshot is in a resolution that comes from an add-in graphics card rather than the Amiga's custom chips. It's a resolution Workbench wasn't graphically designed for, so it looked wrong in such a resolution at the time. If you double the screenshot's height, then everything (text, icons, window gadgets etc) looks right. It would be more representative of the OS, and the era, to have a height-doubled "HiRes" screenshot, 640x200 or 640x256.
- daneel_w 5mo ago
  The aspect ratio is correct on all screenshots and are accurate de-interlaced representations of a 640x400/512 workbench setup, even though these particular screenshots are in RTG dimensions. Starting with ECS, the Amiga was also capable of true non-interlaced 640x400 output (and even 480 vertical lines unless I misremember) in what was commonly called "productivity mode", limited to 4 colors (2 bitplanes). Interlaced workbench setups weren't uncommon. I ran such on and off for years for certain productivity stuff where I wanted more screen real estate, until I decided to spend money on a flicker-fixer.
  - abanana 5mo ago
    > The aspect ratio is correct Yes it is, was my post unclear? Following your suggestion that someone might contribute a screenshot of 1.x, which I agree would be a nice addition, I'm suggesting a "HiRes" screenshot of 2.x or 3.x would be a better representation of how it looked in-period to the vast majority of users. The point is just that the icons, text, and general UI chrome were designed for that lower vertical resolution. I ran the interlaced modes later after buying a flicker-fixer, but didn't know of anyone who used them without one - the flicker meant those interlaced modes weren't generally considered to be very usable.

andrewstuart 5mo ago

The Cambrian period of operating systems and GUIs.

FergusArgyll 5mo ago

There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better? To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever

hermitcrab 5mo ago
There is definitely an element of nostalgia. However, a lot of earlier desktop OS GUIs do seem to be more internally consistent and with more emphasis on usability than the current crop. I think part of the issue is that things that might make sense on a phone have bled into desktop OSes, where they make a lot less sense.
- FergusArgyll 5mo ago
  I don't mean this in a dismissive way but based on your profile I'd say you're > 25. I'm curious about the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with the those os's
  - hermitcrab 5mo ago
    25 is a very distant memory. ;0)
  - funimpoded 5mo ago
    You’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use. That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    I’m > 25, but I didn’t use those OS. I started with Windows XP, then did a bit of playing around with Gnome 2 on Linux Mint. You wouldn’t call them pretty, But you never had to guess about an icon or if an interaction was possible. It was pure get things done (barring crashes and slow hdds). Today’s OS are aesthetically pleasing, especially with the right combination of windows, but using them is a frustrating experience.

piekvorst 5mo ago

No Plan 9. Otherwise, resources like this might help studying how the interfaces of the past evolved (at least, on the surface).

ori_b 5mo ago
The plan 9 interface has evolved quite a bit, but it's largely invisible in screenshots. The differences are in things like triple click behavior, jumps to insertion points, effective use of mouse cursor warping, chording.
- lproven 5mo ago
  Screenshots -- or GIFs -- of Plan 9 compared with Inferno would be most instructive. The Plan 9 folks I've talked to are a bit shocked by this, but I preferred Inferno's GUI to plain old Rio/Acme etc.

hermitcrab 5mo ago

Invisible scroll bars are a source of constant annoyance. And it sometimes takes me several attempts to move a window, because of all the various clickable things without visible boundaries. Frustrating.

anthk 5mo ago
On GNU/Linux run this command, it will fix it for all the GTK based desktops, such as XFCE, Gnome and Mate: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false Under Mac you might have a similar Cocoa setting or whatever is called (nsproperties?) with "defaults write".
- hermitcrab 5mo ago
  I'm on Windows and Mac. Not because I love them, but because that is where my customers are. Also I try to keep my computers fairly vanilla, so that they don't look too different to the user's computer when I do videos or screenshots of my software.
  - elch 5mo ago
    Windows: Settings -> Accessibility -> Always show scrollbars.
    - hulitu 5mo ago
      Which is ignored by most programs.
      - Aachen 5mo ago
        Report as bug. A surprising number of (commercial or open source) projects care about accessibility settings Of course, a smaller but no less surprising number of projects don't. The complexity of such a report is so low, though, that one might as well try for software that you actually use
- 5mo ago

ahmedfromtunis 5mo ago

Can't help noticing how the interface and general mechanics of these old OSes were tightly coupled to the hardware. Both the makers and users of that era seemed to relish that vibe. I know I certainly do. However, that paradigm made computers daunting for anyone who wasn't an enthusiast. While I’m nostalgic for that level of transparency, I recognize that those hurdles stood in the way of mass adoption. We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact. THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency. Modern simplification shouldn't feel like a forced lobotomy of the OS (or any piece of software really). There’s no reason we can't have both: an interface that stays out of the way for the average user, while providing total control for power users. Whatever happened to progressive disclosure?

rschoultz 5mo ago

I distinctly remember, and found, the NeWS (Network extensible windowing sisten), where you could develop with PostScript(TM) for application windows.

DVRC 5mo ago
Over time much NeWS related stuff resurfaced, wheter are application binaries, sources (both application and the server itself) or documentation, so anyone could play with them on a real machine (Sun-3 or SPARC) or inside QEMU SPARC. I'm waiting for a copy of "Portable NeWS 1.0" to be recovered, to see how much different the sources are compared to the 1.1 version. I also hope to see resurface binaries/sources of other server implementations, Sun Symbolic Programming Environment (which includes code originally developed at Schlumberger, including LispScript), the sources of the PdB compiler, CMU Andrew wm (although is not directly related, is the ancestor of this window system, from the same authors), and whatever is related to this system. It would be interesting a revival like Interlisp.

q8zd3 5mo ago

I was not ready to start my day with a OS/2 Warp nostalgia feeling

shevy-java 5mo ago

GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. I first saw this on a friends' parents computer and was quite astonished why computers may look like that. I was very used to Windows/DOS back then. I am also glad to have switched to Linux in 2004 already. Once you have been using Linux for a while, whenever I use windows I am annoyed at how slow it is. Just file copy operations alone and then billion excuses windows developers make, trying to copsplain why it is so slow. When I have to backup 30GB, I don't want an explanation why it is slow - I simply use what is faster. And that's just one advantage of many more Linux has. (I use the commandline most of the time though, so KDE and GNOME are IMO just pointless eyecandy these days.)

lproven 5mo ago
> GEM Desktop 1.2 looks sooooooo like the ancient Apple operating systems. Yes, it does. So much so that Apple noticed and sued. I gave some links in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121011

prevailrob 5mo ago

Them beOS icons were lovely at the time

nailer 5mo ago
God beOS is the absolute peak of pixel-based UI design. It's like what Metal Slug was for pixel art games. Someone needs to add a CRT filter button to the site.
bitigchi 5mo ago
Check out Haiku.

DVRC 5mo ago

The man behind this site is known for his skills of recoverying data from QIC tapes. Looking at the "Software Library" section makes me always wonder if it will be released at some point, since that there is some stuff that isn't on BitSavers or other sites.

delta_p_delta_x 5mo ago

I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.

vbezhenar 5mo ago
You want Linux. Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them. GUI frameworks provide features for applications to draw their UI. A selection of numerous windows managers and desktop environments allows you to choose the best GUI shell to work in. It is somewhat of a bazaar, with different components sometimes not fitting perfectly into each other and there's a constant migration to a best new thing, whether it's systemd, pulseaudio, wayland or pipewire, but generally things work OK and it's not like Windows today offers a significantly different experience. Windows is beyond salvation at this point.
- 201984 5mo ago
  The "constant migration to a new best thing" is a big problem. Once written, a program should be able to run forever, but this is only true on Windows for GUIs and on Linux only for some CLIs. Arch just recently dropped the original vi from its repos because "it no longer compiled" with stricter GCC settings, and if you want to run an older GUI, just forget about it. It's hars to blame people for only targeting the Web or Windows when those two will work forever, but on Linux you have to keep up with the endless treadmill of X11 to Wayland, GTK 2 to 3 to 4, Qt 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, pulseaudio to pipewire, etc., and if you miss just one you may as well give up.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    The entire existence of docker is basically because Linux is impossibly bad at maintaining old software while Windows will still run some terribly old things (though the loss of Win16 is a big one).

jhbadger 5mo ago

While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.

nickdothutton 5mo ago

Nostalgic for VAXstation/DECwindows terminals where at the time the monitor weighed more than I did.

tardedmeme 5mo ago

"403 Forbidden"

jmclnx 5mo ago

xfm from the first Slackware print, I really liked that file manager. But these days it fails to work. I tied many years ago to get it work but failed :(

vessenes 5mo ago

Amazing walk through memory lane, and super useful. One big omission though - starting in the early 1990s, we should be seeing some Linux desktops in there, but I didn’t see any through 1995 or so when I stopped browsing. Also, Irix would be nice to get — although I don’t recall if SGI had much in the way of custom vibes for their window managers, they certainly had amazingly cool 3D demos. A nice vibe coding project here would be to show these in a carousel with the UI being 1:1 pixels. It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. Color, refresh rates, monitor quality, a cool plastic color and design for the box were all part of the experience.

dotancohen 5mo ago
I may have some KDE 2 and 3 screenshots to add.
- vessenes 5mo ago
  Nice. A Redhat Mother’s Day set would be amazing. I didn’t screenshot much in that era, and had a catastrophic data loss in 1998 or so that was a real bummer; Usenet, emails, IRC logs. Even then it hurt, but today, ouch.
whartung 5mo ago
> It’s hard to understand just how different NeXTStep (Did I capitalize that correctly?) felt from Windows — part of it was refresh rates, but part of it was going from 800x600 to 1132x800-ish on the monitor. You can't really get it from these screenshots, but I'll give an example of what you're talking about. I remember GEM when it came out, and it simply looked terrible. Not just their color choice, but simply that low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast. The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy. Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

wink 5mo ago

OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'? The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).

WillAdams 5mo ago
Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers. Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.
- masfuerte 5mo ago
  RISC OS (1987) had built-in support for anti-aliased vector fonts, though they aren't shown in the screenshot. The OS was in ROM and had insufficient space for the actual fonts so they needed to be loaded from disk. This was fine if you had a hard disk but a pita with floppies.
  - WillAdams 5mo ago
    Need to find the time to try that out on a Raspberry Pi....
    - lproven 5mo ago
      You really do. It is pretty much a work of art. I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse. 2022: https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-35-but-its-still-kicking/919144 https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3... 2024: https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open-530-is-here-with-pi-wi-fi-support/307728 https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open... I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, because that's all anyone on board has seen or knows.

paulryanrogers 5mo ago

So much gray, even when the hardware could do color. Perhaps for compatibility with other hardware or get out of the way?

thrownaway561 5mo ago

where's desqview? I ran my first BBS on that back in the 90s before switching over to OS/2 Warp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

eddieh 5mo ago
That Wikipedia article needs a better screenshot. Otherwise, very interesting. And DESQview/X was X Window System on DOS with pre-emptive multitasking, wow.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

3form 5mo ago

It's nice to see some of these things and finally make out any contents! I've felt hurt by Wikipedia's somewhat odd and sad screenshot policy, which makes it impossible to see any details of the things I've been looking at recently, like early Windows NT.

zozbot234 5mo ago
They do that on purpose with proprietary apps to avoid copyright complaints.

drzaiusx11 5mo ago

No Mouse Desk [1], GEOS [2], or GS/OS [3]? Look what you did now, my Apple IIs are just crying in the corner.. 1.https://imgur.com/a/h6dxDRv https://imgur.com/a/h6dxDRv (circa 1985) 2. https://imgur.com/a/IlJSlJT https://imgur.com/a/IlJSlJT (circa 1986) 3. https://imgur.com/a/AIo3jdk https://imgur.com/a/AIo3jdk (circa 1988)

red_admiral 5mo ago

I'm struck how it used to be _almost_ universal that the active window title bar stands out visually from the other ones.

ThinkBeat 5mo ago

It is depressing how little has changed.

rfmoz 5mo ago

I miss on the list Counterpoint GUI for Amstrad PCs with MS-DOS https://www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/Counterpoint/index.html https://www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/Counterpoint/index.html

hulitu 5mo ago

All of them look much, much better than Windows 10, Windows 11, Android or iOS although all run on less powerfull hardware. But using only one level of library to draw on the screen "is so lame'. /s

pmarreck 5mo ago

Well, that was an unexpectedly emotional trip through most of my nerd life to date lol

nxobject 5mo ago

The HPC Integral PC has a fascinatingly compact design... by necessity.

systems 5mo ago

No https version of this site, I configured my browser to warn or block non https websites, since from my experience few of those tried to force download (what i can only assume to be viruses) to my computer I understand that https can do that to, but its usually the none https that does, so its a decent configuration to have Please consider making the site https

noashavit 5mo ago

Anyone here remember dos? The og CLI bases OS

lproven 5mo ago
I offer a modern distro of a DOS. :-) So yes. https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

delfugal 5mo ago

Nice walk through history. So many people trying to be the next big thing.

RRRA 5mo ago

Surprised Enlightenment didn't make the cut while fvwm is there

headgasket 5mo ago

in 30 years someone will do this with LLMs

rawgabbit 5mo ago

I was still in school when OS/2 came out. I read about it in the magazines never touching it myself. I was impressed with its aesthetics but never knew with the clout of IBM why it never took off. My guess is internal politics killed OS/2 more than Microsoft?

mikestew 5mo ago
Internal politics, yeah, maybe; because IBM certainly didn’t do much to market it. That, and bundling deals Microsoft had with OEM hardware vendors (if you want the discount, then Windows has to go on every machine). OS/2 advertised a “better Windows than Windows”. Problem was, software vendors then said, “great, now we don’t have to do an OS/2 port!”
- rawgabbit 5mo ago
  Yes. But with IBM’s war chest at the time, it could have undercut anything Microsoft offered.

zhxiaoliang 5mo ago

Seeing these brought back a flood of memories. Logging onto AOL through GeoWorks for the first time. Clicking that tiny lit apartment window in the Macintosh mouse tutorial and watching the curtain peel back to reveal a couple dancing inside. Mesmerized by the soft shade on OS/2 buttons like they were works of art (yes, I know that’s weird). Bringing my NeXTstation into the office when I was just a lowly game tester and getting that look from my boss. Those really were magical days.

chiffre01 5mo ago

Try this out for all of KDE to CDE window theming needs: https://github.com/spacestate1/cde-plasma https://github.com/spacestate1/cde-plasma

space_ghost 5mo ago
Here's a good starting point for those of us that use XFCE: https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1231025/ https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1231025/

faefox 5mo ago

The BeOS aesthetic has aged so well. I'll always wonder what might've been had they not been deliberately smothered in the crib (or at the very least if Apple had chosen to acquire them).

pdntspa 5mo ago

I hated magenta-blue CGA graphics soooo sooo much as a kid. It was (and still is IMHO) the ugliest thing I ever saw on a computer, by far. I had a monitor that had a switch in the back that would change those colors to red-yellow-green. It was still awful but at least it was less awful than white-magenta-blue

liendolucas 5mo ago

NextStep interface still looks sleek and timeless. No doubt a decaying Apple went to acquire them. Having seen some NextStep demos online, it was way ahead of its time. Few weeks ago just started to use WindowMaker again on one of my VMs.

felixding 5mo ago
Absolutely! I wish projects like nextspace could get more love.

sandbach 5mo ago

Compare https://deskto.ps/ https://deskto.ps/

hilti 5mo ago

Thank you so much for this link :-) I'm studying old operating systems, because it's very interesting how we've been so productive with less screen pixels than we have today. It's basically mind blowing that 800x600 pixels have been a long time enough to get work done. Currently I'm typing this on an iPhone 17 with a larger screen and after all the years there is nothing like a good charting, dashboarding or spreadsheet on it.

unixhero 5mo ago

Impressive collection

LetsGetTechnicl 5mo ago

It's not listed here and maybe I'm just nostalgic for the computer labs from elementary/middle school but Windows 2000 was so peak

zoeysmithe 5mo ago
I think the NT4/2000 desktop was pretty perfect. It laid down everything without getting in your way. A lot of early systems were forced to follow simplicity because of lack of resources. This coincidentally led to better interfaces because complexity is difficult to get right and often is in service of business interests instead of technical interests. I think its obvious that there's a degradation in business products as they age. They become more 'competitive' which means more profit-seeking, so the marketing end of things takes over and the engineering end takes a back seat. Simplicity is replaced with shiny and complexity to catch more edge case sales. Weird cargo cults emerge, product manager cults of personality, etc instead of following proper usability guidelines. Industry fads become self-fulfilling prophecies. Lockdowns and walled gardens emerge because they are more profitable than open systems. Today, I almost can't believe how hostile and bloaty Windows 11 is and MacOS isn't much better. At least we have FOSS, but the commercial end of things is 'late stage' and frankly awful. There's a real tragedy how capitalism always leads here. I sometimes wonder if the USSR stuck around what a more technocratic-led system would produce compared to the West.

morkalork 5mo ago

Is that an illustration of the Canadian museum of history made in Corel Draw I spy?

thomasswift 5mo ago

That beos yellow..

procflora 5mo ago

VUE was so excellent looking it makes me want to run CDE today.

jedberg 5mo ago

I miss my GEM desktop and products. They were so ahead of their time. And Ventura publisher! I made some school projects using that. Brings back some good memories.

loph 5mo ago

That page does not include VMS DECwindows Motif, so here is a link: https://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/OpenVMS.html https://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/OpenVMS.html VMS DECwindows Motif 1.0 was released in August 1991; it is difficult for me to comprehend that was 35(!) years ago. I still have a mouse pad from the release party.

floren 5mo ago
There is the very similar Ultrix version: http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5-mips.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5...

herf 5mo ago

The aspect ratios were much "taller" back then, which was kind of better for editing code. All these late 90s designs were near NTSC at the time - aspect ratios like 1.25:1 (1280x1024) or 1024x768 (1.33:1). Monitors have always followed TVs, since displays now are the "HD" ratio of 16:9 (1.77:1), or 16:10 if we're lucky. But we do get way more pixels now anyway.

tom_ 5mo ago
Use portrait displays! You'll never complain about the height again. Use 1440p (or scaled equivalent) and the width won't be an issue either. Many displays make this easy (all the Dells I've had can rotate), and adequate rotating stands aren't necessarily expensive. There's even maybe some Actual Scientific Evidence to justify the switch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638928

armcat 5mo ago

Sun Solaris PPC (CDE) takes me back. I've built plenty of 3G/WCDMA telephony code on that thing. It never let me down.

zuzululu 5mo ago

im just scrolling through these while I prepare for a VC pitch session and I realize these UI are actually pretty darn good ? Like the old Windows 98 UI (probably biased) to me just handles so much, why can't apps just look like that? Its boring sure but there's no complexity or inferred action there like modern apps ? Why do seniors struggle to use modern mobile phones but in those days they could easily work through those UIs? Just some ranting here but it's shockingly better than what I have currently on Mac

gmmachine 5mo ago
Interesting take. Having said that, did you ever try and use workbench in Amiga? Yet, I remember being around in the 90s and helping seniors navigate Windows98. While it was Windows 98 offered an easier UI/UX than 3.1, was it really superior over the UI/UX of modern interfaces and application design? I too dislike Mac interfaces, and think that KDE is likely the best UI ever. While on KDE, lets include the also German, and now discontinued, YaST over Windows98 control panel!

petemill 5mo ago

Risc OS is the GOAT

gmmachine 5mo ago

I live for Old UNIX screenshots, you just made my day, my week, my month ... ok my year! Thanks! I also love to collect old xpm icons from that era, and try and assemble arcane FVWM configs that weave them in. Oh, NsCDE is a great start if anyone wants to emulate some of the Solaris screenshots in the collection. http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5-mips.png http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5... <-- XV! I used that back in the day. Does anyone remember gv too? GhostView? Another great Motif application for pdf documents. Reviewing the screenshots here, I realize profoundly that something about the idealism of the 1990s is baked into them; the 1990s a time before the bad vibes of commercialism mostly destroyed the interwebs.

Quitschquat 5mo ago

You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.

mc32 5mo ago
No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.
- Quitschquat 5mo ago
  Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.
  - HerbManic 5mo ago
    Yeah some of them just ran bad even on fully speced systems. The vision of the software was far beyond the hardware for a long while.
    - trunkiedozer 5mo ago
      The network is the computer.
  - lproven 5mo ago
    Relevant: "Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes" (May 4, 2026) https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxes/ https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxe...
  - saltcured 5mo ago
    Heh, I still remember how, as undergrads, we thought we all wanted those "pizza box" workstations that grad student were using. But when I was assigned an Ultra (1?) workstation at my first full-time job, I found that it was a better user and development experience to ignore it and use Linux on my Dell notebook, which I think was a Pentium MMX running somewhere around 200 MHz.

rob-olmos 5mo ago

Lifestreams was also an interesting take on a desktop UI back in the day

cachius 5mo ago
[flagged]

rsolva 5mo ago

I remember using some kind of software around the time of windows xp i think, that could replace the chrome/shell so you could design your own GUI entirely – but I can't remember what it was called! I spent a lot of time iterating and experimenting back then, replacing iexplore.exe or whatever the main process was called.

yapfrog 5mo ago
Resource Hacker?
junto 5mo ago
Are you thinking of WindowBlinds / Stardock? https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/ https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/ I seem to remember it was available at the same time as the Winamp skins / viz craze.

ntnsndr 5mo ago

It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other! System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.

metaltyphoon 5mo ago
+1. The idea of making tiling + floating a first class citizen was the best decision they made.

kemist 5mo ago

What wonderful memories, have a vivid one of working on a computer at Kinkos using the old System 7 (Mac OS 8) UI. Thanks :)

watersb 5mo ago

So happy to have been along for that ride. This collection is a great complement to the everything-x86 PC workstation jungle of the day. I built a huge tower PC server to run NeXTStep in 1993, but I had no idea how difficult hardware comparability would be. It was a journey. But things improved quickly. So I installed lots of these: OS/2, Windows NT, NextStep, BeOS, Linux, various BSDs. I found a Computer Shopper from that time. I'm pretty sure I bought one of the tower cases from page 786. Great stuff. Tell them I sent you! https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-march-1993/ https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-march-1993/

__del__ 5mo ago

>you'll dance to anything by toad the wet sprocket. loser. love a good screenshot easter egg

felixsebastian 5mo ago

I was looking for Atari TOS