Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005 | Hacker News Reader

Retrotechnology – PC desktop screenshots from 1983-2005

typewritten.org

128 pointspavlov58 comments

Ah, A/UX! As a boy I wanted nothing more than to install it on my dad's computer — but of course back then it cost tremendous amounts of money, and it may not have been compatible with the software he wanted to run.

Also, is it just me or were BeOS & Macintosh Systems 7 & 8 the high point of colour GUIs? I've never seen anything since which looks as nice.

Ahhhh, depth. How I miss you. Sigh. Well, back to my flat-everything-for-no-real-reason modern digital life.

Give it three years, and the UX community will revert back to something else.

1280x1024 seems incredible for 1990, were people using those resolutions at the time?

It seems weird to think I'm reading this on a monitor with less vertical resolution than that some 27 years later.

In professional circles, sure, esp. where print or graphics were involved (aka 'desktop publishing' and up)

most new home PC's likely had 640x480 or maybe 800x600.

2-3 years later, and yes for sure.

I got my second PC in 1992 or 93; it was an Acer 486 DX2/50 with 4 meg and VESA video. IIRC, the video resolution could be run up to around 1280x1024 (I'm not sure of bit depth, probably 8 bit or maybe 15 bit), but with a 14 inch CRT monitor, Windows 3.1 was not very usable (everything was so tiny, and a bit blurry); I think I used to run at 1024x768 in 16 or 24 bit depth.

Monitors were crazy expensive, though - so was video RAM or cards with a "lot" of RAM. I didn't move up to a 19 inch monitor (Sony Trinitron) until years later, when they finally became affordable to me (around $500.00 USD) - probably around 1996 or 97. I stuck with that monitor for a long while, but eventually got an LCD monitor as a "hand-down" from my work.

A lot of my later equipment came from work cast-offs; sadly that hasn't happened as much as it used to (I have this perverse liking of cast-off hardware). Virtually all of my most recent stuff has been purchased new and assembled, though I do grab the occasional cast-off when and where possible.

I bought an HP UNIX workstation monitor at a computer garage sale around 1995 or 1996 that had 1600x1200 (I think it could even do ~2048 but it flickered like crazy at that resolution) and I used it for years, schlepping it from house to house; it was probably about 5 years old when I got it. It was an absolute beast; weighed about 75 pounds. It required a custom cable to go from VGA to whatever weird composite plus sync connections the monitor had, and in the early days of using it, it required a hand-crafted X configuration file. And, I couldn't see BIOS or boot messages on that monitor because it didn't do the standard VGA/CGA/EGA modes (so I had a spare small monitor just for boot messages). I was excited when the boot messages started using the framebuffer device in Linux because it meant I could finally see my computer booting without a second monitor (though the BIOS messages were still invisible).

So, yeah, there were some awesome workstation monitors back then. Huge price tag, though. I seem to recall looking up what my monitor would have cost new, and it was in the multiple thousands of dollars (I got it for $25, because it had a scratched CRT, which I polished out).

Some of those HPUX monitors were gorgeous (and really freaking heavy), but the Sync on Green made them really hard to use on other machines.

I don't remember exact details, but I do vaguely recall that only some small subset of PC video cards supported the necessary output (I used a Matrox of some sort; they also made video cards for the UNIX workstation market at the time, and I guess the features just carried over to the PC cards), and it needed a pretty expensive custom cable that cost me more than the monitor to hook it up. It was a long time ago, but I stuck with that monitor well past the point where flat panel LCD monitors were popular and affordable because it was such a beautiful, bright, clear, picture. It was huge, too, for the time. I think it was 24", but I may be misremembering...maybe 21". 4:3 displays are just a lot more surface area for the same diagonal inches.

I ended up putting it out by the road on large garbage pickup day, after failing to find someone who wanted it (even for free). I got tired of lugging it from house to house. A couple of houses and apartments with stairs were enough to convince me that it was time to go LCD. But, it was a fun problem getting it to work.

There were 1150x900 monitors in 1983: http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/symbolics/3600technic...

In the mid-'80s the workstation PC vendors like Sun were competing to introduce a "3M computer". The three 'M's were megabyte, megapixel, MIPS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

In the thirty years since, we've got fifty thousand times more performance (a recent Intel desktop CPU easily does 50,000 MIPS) and sixteen thousand times more memory... But most computers barely have two megapixel screens.

Imagine describing the scene of someone running the Atom editor on a 1080p laptop to someone from the 90s who complained about Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping[1]. It would seem so odd; 8GB of ram, 4 cores running billions of instructions per second each. Also there's a terraflop scale massively parallel supercomputer with 2GB of RAM dedicated to drawing overlapping windows.

1: Backronym for "EMACS"

In fairness that parallel supercomputer was built for wrangling absurd numbers of triangles before it turned out to also be good at doing small groups of rectangles.

That's one of the reasons that I'm actually a little excited for Moore's Law coming to an end. For years it has been more economical to program quickly and somewhat wastefully, leaving many people with slower computers behind. Now the economics are changing, and the competition will be in creating the most efficient software, to everyone's benefit.

We just moved everything to the cloud, where you can microservices your way to even more wasted MIPS. In the past, your text editor only wasted both cores on your laptop, but now it can waste all the cores on half a dozen AWS instances.

Absolutely, monitors had far greater resolution than 1280x1024, especially for creative professionals.

What you are really pointing out is that the industry sells the minimum it can to hit a price point while keeping margins.

LCDs really did us a disfavor by imposing a fixed resolution. Before LCDs there was a wide range of available resolutions for different needs.

I recall a 4kx4k vector system from HP in the 80's that was when HP was "you have to ask" you cant afford it :-)

My current CRT monitor was made in 1997 and is 1600x1200@70Hz. They existed, but were expensive. FYI, due to CRT blanking times, the dot-clock for my VGA monitor is actually slightly higher than what single-channel DVI can manage. I had to use a graphics card with a VGA port until good DP/VGA adapters became available in the past few years.

My first PC compatible was a former CAD machine my dad's work was getting rid of. 10MB hard disk, 720x348 resolution (~2:3 pixel aspect ratio). Vertical resolution was harder due to having to accurately position the line, but horizontal resolution was limited primarily by how fast you modulate the power.

Standard on SGI workstations from a very early age. Normally with a beautiful Trinitron display with the 'epic' SGI logo at the bottom, looking as cool as 'a Tesla badge on a car' but infinitely cooler.

There were two faint 'mask' lines in the Trinitron display, but other than that, the colours were every bit as amazing as today's latest AMOLED displays.

Compared to the cost of the box or even broadcast standard 'D1' monitors, the expense on a high resolution screen and the RAM to push the pixels was not a big deal.

Obviously PC's came from a different beginning. Adding on a £3000 screen was not going to happen.

If you follow workstatins back 'to Xerox PARC' they have always been super-hi res. Even Sun workstations of the 'SunTools' era were high resolution, albeit mono.

IMHO The weird 16:9 aspect ratio really screwed us for usability. A 19" 4:3 monitor has the same height as a 23" 16:9 monitor. However I remember 1280x1024 being commonly available on games and on Windows by the time Windows 98 came out and earlier in games.

My brother had a 486 that I think I could run the game Mechwarrior 2 by Sierra at 1280x1024. The refresh rate went down to 60hz but it was doable and we didn't have a top of the line system even at the time (mid-late 90's). Here's a 1024x768 screenshot:

https://r.mprd.se/media/images/94067-Mech_Warrior_2_Mercenar...

The 1280x1024 resolution is weird though, it isn't 4:3. So everyone running it on CRTs got a stretched image. That resolution was for 17" and 19" LCDs which actually had that 5:4 aspect ratio.

But yes, 16:9 is a total abomination and it is a shame that 4:3 is completely dead. They make excellent secondary displays (and good primary displays as well).

1280x1024 was on the low side in mid nineties. Intergraph InterView 28hd96 had a max resolution of 2048x1152 @ 80 Hz. $10K in 1997. Carmack famously coded Quake 2 on one of those.

Packard Bell 486 was my first desktop. I remember working on a green screen at school and discovering the CLI. I probably crashed half of the school's computers just playing around.

I had one at home, tinkering around and learning to program in QBASIC on it. I wish I still had it just to experience the certain charm of doing things the way you used to do them, but it sadly stopped consistently booting over a decade ago.

I'd pay $300 (maybe more) right now for a tiny, durably-housed (I'd be letting my kids use it) 486-alike machine with a smallish integrated-into-housing LCD and keyboard, and maaaaybe a mouse and an old-school joystick/pad or two, but their absence is in no way a deal-breaker, running legit MS-DOS 6.x or something 100% compatible (not sure how FreeDOS is on the compatibility front) with some reasonable solution for getting software onto it over USB or SDCard or something. And a foolproof factory-reset hardware switch. No moving parts a must.

I know this may not qualify as "durably housed" but maybe get your hands on an old Netbook or similar laptop? I'd probably give FreeDOS a try for the OS. It's still supported to some degree and is probably better than getting your hands on an old MS-DOS or DR-DOS that hasn't been touched in years. It was good enough for a couple of the major PC makers to ship it on a few models in later years.

You could build something for kicks but a laptop would be a lot easier and probably cheaper.

[ADDED: I have an old laptop I don't use for anything any more. I may give this a try myself.]

My kids are very young and there are three of them. I struggle to find time when my brain's not already totally fried to finish even simple 1-2 hour projects, let alone re-housing a laptop to be kid proof and fiddling to get DOS drivers working on it, as much fun as that kind of thing might have been to 5-years-ago-me. This many kids+full-time work is roughly equivalent to having a 90-hour-a-week job. I'd rather pay for a finished product—otherwise it'll never happen, and if I try I'll just have a mess somewhere in the house that I'll fiddle with for 30 minutes every few weeks, never making progress. Gotta pick my battles.

A Raspberry pi will do all of that. Emulating a 486 is no big deal these days. Otherwise, early Pentium laptops aren't hard to come by.

The 486 was a fun box, for sure. One of these days I wanna retrofit an old case for modern system use, complete with a cheeky "turbo" button.

What a blast to the past. I love seeing old systems, makes me want to get a couple of older machines just to play around with them.

BeOS in particular is a huge lament on what could have been - at the time, it was the slickest OS I had ever had the chance to play with and loved it dearly. I appreciate the Haiku project, but sadly I don't know how much of a place it truly has in the modern world beyond being a nostalgia toy.

Well, we're (Haiku) still the snappiest OS around, and while we're continuously playing catch-up, there are a number of people who do use it as their daily driver. Don't give up hope yet. :)

Alleycat ! Am I that old ???

The worst part may be that I recognized it right away.

Defeat that pesky broom: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984

That's a wonderful collection of images. Specially interesting are the ones showing Unix on Acorn and Atari TT computers.

Does anyone know why those chunky, slightly unattractive fonts were so common - even sometimes in the cases of a higher-res screen? A couple of the examples of what I'm talking about...

Here's Risc OS 3.10: http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/risc-os-3.10.png

It's an older system with a relatively row resolution but each letter looks (to me) to be stretched vertically (or squeezed horizontally) - if you look at the elements on the windows (like the X or the border on the scroll-bars) you can see that this isn't simply a case of not having enough pixels available

This Amiga Workbench 3.5 one is another nice example: http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/workbench-3.5-retina...

The font seems really chunky to me and the environment clearly supports "better" (very subjective, I know)

I missed this era by a few years - maybe someone can shed some light on whether the window systems themselves were impressive enough on their own, or perhaps people found them more familiar (like they stuck around after moving from command-line to GUI)?

I get that I'm coming from an age where we have extremely high dpi screens and font anti-aliasing etc, but I've also worked with 5x7 and even 3x7 fonts (see http://blog.mclemon.io/arduino-5x8-iso-8859-2-font and http://blog.mclemon.io/hacking-a-tiny-new-font-for-the-ssd13...) and the systems above looked like they could support better than this.

Some older computers had weird resolution / aspect ratio combination.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/N...

Basically, if you play video games from the DOS era on a modern computer without correcting their aspect ratio they look stretched, and that was not how they were supposed to look.

So, the same goes for fonts. They look weird if you look at it with your current resolution and aspect ratio. They would look more condensed/thinner on the CRT monitors of the DOS era.

> The thing is, most MS-DOS games were actually rendered in 320x200, which is a 16:10 aspect ratio and thus widescreen – but they weren't displayed that way. I won't pretend I know all the technical details – there are way better sources for that – simply put, the CRT monitors back then stretched images to fit the screen.

> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something close to 320x240. What today we see as a sharp, square pixel was actually a blurry rectangle back then, about 20% taller than wider (the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST and other home computers all had different resolutions, but the principle is quite similar).

Even if you're lowering your current monitor resolution you're not actually seeing those fonts the way they were meant to be rendered. That's because your monitor will display a native DOS resolution as widescreen. When CRT monitors of the time took that widescreen resolution and turned it square.

There's a lot of understanding about old rendering methods that has been lost in the mainstream. The article I linked also showed how people exploited scanlines to make water look transparent in a very smoothed way. Your LCD pixel grid just doesn't show things the way old low resolution CRTs did.

That's an excellent article - especially the Sonic waterfall/transparency part. Thanks!

> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something close to 320x240.

Not necessarily close to 320x240. Linearly addressable mode X was 320x240.

Very few games bothered with mode X. Most used the much easier to program mode 13h.

Unchained made int 13h easier than regular int 13h, but what about mode x was much more difficult to program? You got a faster display, square 4:3 pixels, and double buffering in 256 colors.

On a PAL/NTSC TV or monitor you preferred non-interlaced modes like 640x272 which had more vertical resolution than horizontal - so it's just readability. Interlaced modes were hard on your eyes because of the flickering.

Because the electron gun in a CRT moves primarily horizontally, drawing a thin vertical line was difficult. It would very often come out very blurry, especially on low-end equipment. So font makers often used double-width horizontal pixels to make up for this.

The Commodore 64 font is an excellent example of this kind of compromise.

Does anyone know if the source code to those SunOS graphic demos are available? I'd love to see and play with the suncube code especially. I tried to find it, but the best I found was an old tape archive file of SunOS 2.0 - and I have no idea how to easily restore that (plus, I doubt source code was included, and it was for m68k - so yeah, it might take some work to get it running again, if a VM exists).

EDIT: I did find out information about something called "TME" The Machine Emulator (http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/) which apparently can emulate various m68k systems to run SunOS on top of, so in theory, I might be able to get this tape archive installed and running.

But again, I doubt that the source code is included, which is what I'd really like to see...

For future explorers:

I found this:

https://winworldpc.com/product/sunos/4x

Download the file "SunOS 4.1.4 Solaris 1.1.2 Source" - go to the "demos" directory and a bit of searching you can find the "suncube.c" file.

Lots of dependencies on "suncore" graphics libs and such, but the code is there. Also - check out the /games folder - it has C source in it for "adventure", "hack" (nethack), and "trek" (star trek).

Wow. You can just see exactly where MacOS came from when you see that GEM Xerox Ventura screenshot...

I also love the suntools screens: so simple and nicely contrasted. What OS is that?

EDIT: this really makes me sad we only have like 3 major OSs now, I never knew how much I was missing until I saw all this.

There's definitely a similarity, but you've got the causal chain reversed (if there is one). The GEM UI was influenced by the Mac, at least determined judicially. This was the source of the initial "look-and-feel" lawsuit Apple won in the 80s.

> "At this point, Apple Computer sued DRI in what would turn into a long dispute over the "look and feel" of the GEM/1 system, which was an almost direct copy of Macintosh (with some elements bearing a closer resemblance to those in the earlier Lisa, available since January 1983)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#G...

It's not surprising, though, given that Lee Lorenzen, formerly of Xerox PARC, wrote much of the code.

Oh interesting, I assumed it was the other way around because of the word "Xerox" in the name.

I can see why they sued...

The MS operating systems are weirdly underrepresented in this collection.

They're actually represented just about right if the screenshot collection goal is to show changes throughout time. There's screenshots of Windows 2.1, 3.0 and NT 4.0. Windows from 95 to 2000 kept the exact same look. There's absolutely no point in having a screenshot of each iteration in between. There's just not enough visual and conceptual UI change to really make it worth it having shots of 95, 98, NT4, ME, 2000. A shot of any of these will speak for the entire timeframe.

Compare this shot of Windows 2000 to the one of NT4 they feature on their page :

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win2000ad...

See any major change? right.

Windows XP is missing but in a way it might not count as retro enough because it has lived and been with us for far, far longer than most OS usually do.

That's the first Intergraph gui on CLIX I've seen. I almost still regret not buying two Intergraph computers at auction a decade ago. I still somehow ended up with a Clipper CPU board though. The last I searched the Internet, there just isn't much information about these machines.

I've never heard of SunTools before – did they really have 1152x900 resolution back in 1985?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2

A typical configuration of a monochrome 2/120 with 4 Mb of memory, 71 Mb SCSI disk and 20 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $29,300 (1986 US price list).

A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list).

[multiply by 2.2 to convert to 2017 dollars]

Man... My desktop really hasn't changed much from 2005.

Love to see an animated GIF version of this website.

Specially if one can capture some of cool Linux KDE GL special effects.

Damn, that SS from 1993 was a sweet system [1]. My 486-66 (DX2) from 1992 with 16 MiB of RAM, a ~340 MiB HD, and 17" sony trinitron set me back more than $5,000.

http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/nextstep-3.1-x86.png

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