http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm
I feel like the style of the UI, though dated, helps a lot: the borders and hierarchy force you to think about how UI components are related, not just where they are on screen. Unlike, e.g. modern Firefox tabs, which just feel like weird floating text with arbitrary ugly borders that never seem to feel less alien no matter how long you use them. They're not literally unusable... but they're not particularly good, especially compared to what we had before.
This gives me hope for projects like SerenityOS. A bit of oldschool UI design with some modern amenities. In theory, this seems like a good idea.
The UIs of today are largely designed by people who have experienced GUIs for their entire lives, and assume that everyone is already familiar with conventions. Focus testing is seen as slow and expensive, so designers lean on A/B testing and telemetry, randomly breaking live user experiences in small batches to creep toward local maxima. Needing a help system is viewed as old-fashioned; users should paw at UIs like a puzzle box to discover features. Computers and displays are powerful enough for every application to be a unique "branded experience".
Personally I'd probably take some version of Mac OS 8/9 as peak mouse driven GUI design. The third party app ecosystem in Mac OS was a lot better about respecting UI conventions on the platform IMHO, Windows app UIs were all over the place for me during this period as they transitioned out of the DOS era.
Simple things, like how installing apps was just dragging them to a folder, not the plethora of setup.exe examples found on Windows, were pretty nice back then on the Mac UI.
There are of course lots of things that sucked about old Mac OS then - memory management etc - but the UI design was great.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms997507...
I really like all the UI changes introduced in 2000. Especially the color palette: that subtle change from strong gray in 9x to lighter one worked pretty well. With all the gradients on icons, preview pane in Explorer, Tahoma as default UI font and introduction of transparency/fade elements I forget 98 SE quickly. And of course there was the stability of the NT - back then the price was lack of compatibility with games.
The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...
It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB.
It ran all games and applications that I tried to run.
I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility.
It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.
I don't know why it took me so long to try it. KDE is an excellent steward of this style of user interface.
- The lack of overhead required by security and 'features' like querying an internet search when you click the start menu or showing advertising in the calculator or better memory management in general, meant that overall UI response in that era used to be much _MUCH_ faster than it is today. Once upon a time you could operate your O/S with the speed of a Starcraft tournament winner; this simply is not possible any more.
- You could 'queue' commands - clicking the close button on an program and then (before it had finished closing) clicking the minimise button would minimise the program behind it immediately after the closing process finished. In this way you could chain/queue commands rather than being forced to wait for the OS to update between each step.
- Enter and Spacebar did different things. If a prompt had two buttons, one would be outlined with a thick black line that would respond to [Enter], and one would be outlined in a dotted line that would respond to [spacebar]. This is still the case sometimes but is far from ubiquitous.
- The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click. Though still used by some MS programs today like Explorer, its usefulness is lessened if not all programs utilise it.
- Don't even get me started on keyboard shortcuts.
These kinds of universally-accepted and _useful_ power-user-oriented design principles are almost absent from UX as it is implemented today.
I would nominate late AmigaOS or BeOS as having a better WIMP UI than any Windows.
I remember I was blown away the first time I installed from an ubuntu live cd.
I'm trying not to have a panic attack that "Windows 98" unambiguously counts as retrocomputing now though.
Oh you can totally go up to Windows XP for this denomination. Some would argue you may even go to 7.
Windows 10 is 9-10 years old and nobody ever cared or will ever be nostalgic about Windows 8 which is 12 years old so it’s not unreasonable to consider anything before that, "Retro".
Oh no. The manual stated I could simply go online to find the required drivers on the new-fangled world wide web.
Which, incidentally, was why I had bought the adapter in the first place.
Next time I was blown away with installs was when I unbricked my pixel phone from Chrome!
You’d have to fix it by removing the file within BASIC using the built in command (KILL I think) then saving it in uppercase.
Can’t say MS considered it a bug or simply chose to not fix it for backward compatibility. It existed in quite late versions.
In early days, computers just don't do lowercase.
When you do case-insensitivty, storing names in uppercase make sense if all older filesystem are uppercase only
It's like how people write SQL with uppercase keywords, but not any other language. I suppose it's learning by emulation and then old habits die hard.
People have syntax coloring in other languages.
Pardon the breach of rules for a moment: IT'S EASIER TO READ THIS THAN it's easier to read this.
On Windows 200 and XP you could install additional recovery console - which in later version has become a default addition to the system
"Modern" today means "recently changed". Not better, not less bugs, just that it's recently changed. It can even have more bugs, but it still will be "modern", and people will be OK with that, because since it's recently changed, it has to have bugs, right?
Examples:
- "in some programs, double-clicking program icon on top-left window will close the program. it's a same actions as Win3.1 even Win1.0, where the close button is placed on top-left window until Win95." quote Rizki Fauzan (not counting this as a Windows 1.0 remnant because it was still useful in 3.1)
Why is it a problem? Why removing this feature is desirable? I often doubleclick the icon to close the window (because my Linux desktop has X in the top left corner instead of top right). Why it's desirable to not have this feature?
- pifmgr.dll and moricons.dll (ancient icon libraries) - left since Windows 3.1
Those icons are often superior to their "modern" counterparts, even though they’re not vector graphics. Why would anyone want to remove them?
- ODBC Data Sources - unchanged since Windows 3.1
I wonder if the author even knows what ODBC is?
Some of the entries are also wrong (msconfig has been updated since Win98).
This list in the center of why I am depressed by today's software design.
That's what modern always means. Sometimes modern is good, sometimes it's bad; this applies to art, technology, cuisine, lifestyles, etc. Although on windows 'Modern UI' was a keyword refering specifically to the Tiles UI and everything that went with it. I think Microsoft has tried to forget that. If the term sticks, 'Modern UI' will become the same sort of term as 'Art Nouveau' that means New Art in theory, but means art in a style that was defined around 1880-1910.
I don't get it. Why being so overly critical? Why should they update the ODBC.exe or dxdiag.exe, or even regedit.exe? They serve their purpose and work just fine.
I live in the EU and only about 1/10 sites have a banner that show up for me.
Cookie notices are at least easy to get rid of, there exist various adblocker filter lists specifically for that. That popup though...
Whenever I had to reinstall Windows (which was frequent back in Win98 days), I had to first install DOS from floppy, then Win 3.11 from floppy, then a CD-ROM driver, then Win95 from CD until I could finally install Win98. (at one point I acquired a non-upgrade version of Win95 but it came on 20+ floppies, so the installation was not really much faster).
The end-result was a Win98 installation with a lot of old software lying around as the 'upgrade' installers did not always remove all of the existing items.
I would copy the hard drive contents from one drive to the next each time I bought a new drive, and ultimately that installation survived three complete hardware refreshes and countless interim component upgrades.
Needless to say, there was a LOT of cruft hanging about by the end. From ancient components from old versions of Visual Studio to drivers for early 2000s era scanners. Most of it still ran too, testament to Microsoft’s backwards compatibility.
To clean-install Windows 98 using the Upgrade version, it would accept either 3.1x or 95 installation media. After the verification, it'll proceed to work exactly like the fully-purchased product version, no cruft from an older OS (since the older OS was never installed in the first place).
I know they continued doing this at least up until Windows Vista and 7. Helpful especially since Windows 2000 was a qualifying operating system for Vista upgrade, but a direct upgrade wasn't possible from 2000; it could directly upgrade from XP, though. Windows 7 would restrict the qualifying OSes to XP and Vista, and only allow direct upgrades from Vista. (Never tried newer versions of Windows, can't say what 8/10/11 do, but I have little reason to believe the practice has changed.)
I do remember playing similar shenanigans just a couple of years ago when I bought a laptop without Windows and I did not know that the Windows licence that came with my old laptop was bound to that machine...
I had a random Windows 8 key lying around and through a bit of wrestling (which I should have probably documented...) I was able to use that to install a new copy of Win10 on my laptop (which should be upgradable to Win11).
WinPE has its roots in NT5.1 (XP), but it was from NT6.0 (Vista) that we got the "modern" installer, and it last saw a UI overhaul during NT6.1 (7). Throughout 8 through 11 so far, the first part of the installer was and is basically Windows 7.
The screenshot[1] of WinPE 10.0 on that Wikipedia article showcases the Windows Basic[2] theme in all its glory, including even the Windows 7 and prior Task Manager.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_PE_screenshot.png
PE was built using XP but the XP installer was mostly the NT installer (text mode then Mini-Windows).
Before Vista, the installer process on NT had three phases:
1. Optional DOS phase to bring minimal NTLDR environment up
2. "Micro" NT without Win32 API that ran only NTAPI (NE format executables et al) applications in the minimal console support (with the characteristic default of white on blue). This would do equivalent of "minimal install" on unices to the target disk, setting up proper HAL.DLL, boot time drivers, and setting up registry hives.
3. GUI installer that booted from hard disk with Win32 subsystem enabled.
chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/... : Page not found
This is really wrong. I wanted to read that discussion.
For some reason, you'll need to be logged into Stack Exchange to view that.
Screen-grab: https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aalu.jpg
So, thanks for the screengrab! I'm always a bit annoyed by people cleaning comments like this to move it to chat when stack exchange chat is so bad and somehow always has messed up timestamps.
That was the highlight of my year and I showed it to all my schoolmates.
I assume this is the one you’re talking about https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
I was curious, went to the end (page 699!) and it’s pretty interesting. But obviously it’s hard to find the important ones.
