The Restart Page: rebooting experience from vintage operating systems | Hacker News Reader

The Restart Page: rebooting experience from vintage operating systems

therestartpage.com

104 pointsohjeez16 comments

This is brilliant! Sites like this remind me of what made the Web great: nothing to sell you, nothing to advertise, nothing to buy; just some nerdy amalgamation of the reboot sequences of yesteryear.

Not that you would have discovered the page without a hyperlink to it. Maybe, just maybe, that's what made the web great. ;-)

The Amiga one is wrong. It shows a 2.0+ restart window, but then does a 1.3 boot when you click it.

Edit: Also, there are some oddities with the Windows 2000 one. The gradient-bar... thing, scrolls from right to left, but it should go the other way. And the boot progress bar starts out solid and ends up dashed, but should do the reverse.

The XP one makes an alert noise, and then the shutdown sound. As I understand it, the error noise is some program crashing or showing an error in the background, but you can't see it because, well, it's showing that shutdown screen.

Also, on the Windows 95 and 98 ones, you can double-click an option to do that action - instead of clicking e.g. "Shut down" and then OK, you can just double-click "Shut down" to shut down.

I think the Win2k gradient bar is animating too fast as well.

Interesting to note the patterns of where you put 'default' actions.

Most of the Mac screenshots have the 'ok' button on the right, while windows is usually (but not always) on the left.

This is always a UX debate when designing something new, and you can always find supporting examples of doing it a variety of ways. It's a bit surprising that it still hasn't been settled after all these decades.

Maybe because settling UX decisions that have become part of habits, documentation and shared visual language in one environment in favor of the complete opposite would by itself be worst practice in terms of UX?

(see the changes of Windows' Start button and its surroundings and how users appreciated it)

Not present for reasons obvious to end users: the OpenVMS or AS/400 restart pages. Usually just a vague memory for them. ;)

One of the nice things about being an old fogey is that I've seen almost all of these...

Awesome. but would have liked to see some old Linux, SunOS, IRIX, etc. reboot screens.

This is amazing. Recalling many times trying to press DEL quickly enough to get into BIOS set up... sadly doesn't work.

Has anyone found an Easter Eggs?

I know Windows Me was bad, but did its gradient progress bar really go backwards?

I felt an instant of panic when I saw the restart countdown.

The Amiga restart even has floppy drive sounds.

Nice!

I wish the Mac SE one had the classic BING! and then hard drive sounds. Lots of memories of restarting Mac SEs to play games.

Wow. The Amiga one brings back some memories.

"Sorry mate, but the Restart Page only works in desktop computers. We think that in order to reproduce the original rebooting experience you need to be seated in front of your personal computer, as we used to do back in our beloved Amiga Workbench days. Press the button below to email yourself a reminder to revisit The Restart Page."

Meta and whiny trigger warning.

Not a chance. I don't do any casual browsing on my actual computer. Reading this has just made sharply aware of that, which is interesting in itself, so thanks, I guess!

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