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> 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 go

> 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

zozbot234 5mo ago
> The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy. The Amiga was designed to look good on the crappiest TV around. It was a home computer, not a professional workstation. But if you had a nice monitor, high-res B&W screen modes were easily available.
- icedchai 5mo ago
  Amiga OS 2.0 was a huge improvement in that regard! It had more of a 3D look.
- abanana 5mo ago
  Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor? I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".
cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
RE: GEM, the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor was actually a super high quality monitor that was known at the time for producing a crisp comfortable image, and it was higher resolution (640x400) than the Mac (512x342). GEM on it actually looked really good. The problem was two fold: with the Atari you had the choice of one or the other (colour or mono), the colour was very low resolution, GEM looked squished and crappy and cheap in low (360x200) & med-res (640x200) on colour .. and on the application development side there just wasn't the same caliber and quantitiy of developers to build good looking GEM applications. But I mean if you look at some of the better more sophisticated applications like Cubase or Calamus or the original version of Logic, they were pretty nicely designed. The base window decorations were a bit chunky compared to the Mac .. but not awful, and also easily changed. There were accessories that re-themed things via changing the font. GEM over top of DOS on the PC? Yeah, awful. The Ventura Publisher branch of GEM looked decent though
- rmason 5mo ago
  I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast. For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.
  - cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
    GEM was very much an incomplete project, is my take on it. Which makes sense when you consider DR had to be -- seemingly for the life of the company -- pretty scrappy. Once Windows was on the scene, there was no point in them dumping a boatload of resources into it. Its original advocate and designer, Lee Lorenzen, left DR to go create his own startup and make Ventura Publisher (which shipped with its own copy of GEM). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.) On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.

zozbot234 5mo ago

> The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy. The Amiga was designed to look good on the crappiest TV around. It was a home computer, not a professional workstation. But if you had a nice monitor, high-res B&W screen modes were easily available.

icedchai 5mo ago
Amiga OS 2.0 was a huge improvement in that regard! It had more of a 3D look.
abanana 5mo ago
Indeed, is this a comparison of home computers running on a cheap TV, with business computers running on an expensive monitor? I remember being amazed at how sharp the Amiga Workbench looked when I upgraded from an old TV to a "real" monitor. On the flip side, I was disappointed with how the ground in Cannon Fodder was now a collection of individual crisp pixels, instead of all blurring together as before. That gave me a very clear illustration of how it was "designed to look good on the crappiest TV".

cmrdporcupine 5mo ago

RE: GEM, the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor was actually a super high quality monitor that was known at the time for producing a crisp comfortable image, and it was higher resolution (640x400) than the Mac (512x342). GEM on it actually looked really good. The problem was two fold: with the Atari you had the choice of one or the other (colour or mono), the colour was very low resolution, GEM looked squished and crappy and cheap in low (360x200) & med-res (640x200) on colour .. and on the application development side there just wasn't the same caliber and quantitiy of developers to build good looking GEM applications. But I mean if you look at some of the better more sophisticated applications like Cubase or Calamus or the original version of Logic, they were pretty nicely designed. The base window decorations were a bit chunky compared to the Mac .. but not awful, and also easily changed. There were accessories that re-themed things via changing the font. GEM over top of DOS on the PC? Yeah, awful. The Ventura Publisher branch of GEM looked decent though

rmason 5mo ago
I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast. For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3.1 when I first used the Mosaic browser on the then new world wide web and my life was never the same again.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  GEM was very much an incomplete project, is my take on it. Which makes sense when you consider DR had to be -- seemingly for the life of the company -- pretty scrappy. Once Windows was on the scene, there was no point in them dumping a boatload of resources into it. Its original advocate and designer, Lee Lorenzen, left DR to go create his own startup and make Ventura Publisher (which shipped with its own copy of GEM). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.) On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.