Archive and github links if you get 500 errors:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp....
the GUI design of this era was really something else, its hard to describe but the UIs felt so discoverable, the basic core features were presented up front and easy to use, intermediate features could be found in widgets surrounding the core UI, and a whole set of advanced features within the menus once you've mastered your surroundings. It's as if the UIs of the time were designed to create an efficient learning path, at the expense of some information overload when first using the application.
These days, something as trivial as finding the settings dialog in the app can be a challenge, especially on mobile.
Nowadays, UIs are designed with the expectation that users don’t learn them. This limits what software can do, but (I don’t mean this cynically) was probably necessary to bring those apps to the majority.
Fortunately Thunderbird (and Firefox) uses Gtk theming for the most part and i've used a Motif-y theme for Gtk3, so it picks up most things.
As someone who was in their mid to late teens at the time, I find nostalgia for Windows XP in particular a bit funny because back then, people couldn’t disable the new UI and activate the “classic look” (Windows NT/9x style) fast enough.
Today, I'd be willing to tolerate the ugliness of XP Blue Luna if it meant consistent UX behavior. But this isn't an endorsement of Luna - merely a sign of how far we've fallen.
I know, because I accidentally ran the test on myself when I picked up a test devices at one point and marved at how beautiful the new iOS was, then I realized that I had picked up a super old device that was running iOS 6, which was the last one before the flat era.
XP was a huge upgrade over 98, and Win 7 was the last good operating system MS has made. If I could get a security/stability/driver upgrade to Win xp so that it works with modern hardware, I might still have been a Windows user today.
Except WSL Microsoft hasn't added any useful features to Windows that I can recall or are excited about since.
That said, I don't think you should put too much into the exact version of Windows emulated here - had it been 98, 95 or even Windows for Workgroups it would have been equally awesome.
EDIT: Did not know that links and text could be combined in a single submission, nor that the submission could be edited for so long (the archive.org and github.com links were recently added apparently).
· Show the rest of the page if the HN content isn't loadable.
The server doesn't seem to have any problem delivering the static assets, which are the majority of the work. Server-side rendering is awesome, but there's got to be a way to not lose the whole layout on server error?
· Load the HN content from somewhere else client-side rather than proxying through your server.
I don't have experience to share the ideal source, but I do know HN has an official API. Implementing caching may be enough to allow the server to handle it.
Congrats on your project getting so much traffic!
Out of curiosity - can I ask you what infrastructure this is running on? Is this some dedicated bare metal or a basic $5 VPS? I am curious as of what it actually takes to give your site a "HN hug of death" once you reach first page.
Thanks.
For folks passing through, the image is of a virtual Windows XP desktop complete with Bliss background, taskbar, and Outlook Express showing emails, where each email is an HN link. I may just need to set this as my new HN bookmark!
Then have a server process somewhere that generates scheduled updates of the site on a scheduled basis.
I would think the site does not have to be real time,
The last time I used Outlook express on Win XP were the glory days of attachment and automatic preview worm emails. Back then we thought sending a bit of jscript or vbscript to an email client should of course be automatically executed and run when received or clicked to preview the contents. shudder
As said elsewhere, server errors should look have a BSoD-like appearance ;)
OMG, that is so cool! :D
I want to put my browser in an XP frame to make it look retro.
