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Comment by amiga-workbench | Hacker News Reader

When actual thought and reasoning went into UI design. Nice to see the methodology.

I doubt that Microsoft has really departed from the UI design methodology they used. The dubious decisions are most likely pushed from either the marketing department or from above. But I think Windows itself, even the newer versions, is quite well designed.

Apple probably also has a pretty solid design process.

Have we actually reached the point where we idolize something that was equally mainstream to bash when it came out? Remember "Winblows" &c?

Suddenly, faced with hyper-spy mega-corps, the dumb simplicity of the evil-yet-cute Windows 95 is desirable. Like the lesser of two evils, or the evil you know.

Any day now, a post will come up extolling the illumined joys of mainframe COBOL programming.

I'm no luddite but several areas of computing have had serious regressions. I still have Windows 95 machines kicking around and I know how fickle they are, but you will never hear me saying a bad word about the UI.

> Remember "Winblows" &c?

There were many, many things wrong with Windows 95 (and its successors). But the design of the Shell was solid. (Also, considering how hardware requirements have skyrocketed, it might seem remarkable to some that it could run on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM and a CPU that makes today's low-end mobile phones look like supercomputers and still feel snappy.)

I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that.

> I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that.

If you think of shutdown as a "stop" command to the computer, you see the contradiction: to stop your computer, press start.

I get that, I just never thought it was very funny. Start might not have been the best name for that button, but the idea of having a single a menu to access all OS functionality and applications was good. Still is good, in fact, which why so many people got upset when they removed it in Windows 8.

There was even a parody song about how much Windows 95 sucked, but the criticism seemed more popularly aimed at its resource requirements than the UI design.

The requirements were practically negligible for its era, and the leap it represented. I have installed and used it at length on 386 with 8MB on a 210MB disk. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't pretty bad either. Perhaps (on appropriate hardware) it wasn't as solid as NT 4, but before XP (which is 2000 which is NT, even if simplifying it) there weren't many "polished enough" _and_ "affordable enough" windowing systems for the masses. Classic Mac OS was very polished but not very affordable, and it didn't even have pre-emptive multiprocessing. UNIX had either a high cost of entry if you're talking workstations (Suns and SGIs were polished but expensive) or man-hours to acclimatize (try running X11 in 1995, then compare to Windows 95).

Eh.

In any case, to bring it back. It was good enough. Nowadays, I often hope for a minimal Windows 10 that will be out of the way enough to approach Windows 95.

> The requirements were practically negligible for its era

Your 8 MB was the "recommended" requirement for 95, with 4 MB being the minimum. That wasn't pretty. If you have used 95 with only four megabytes of RAM and a small, slow hard drive, you'll learn that the minimum requirements are quite lower than comfortable, probably in order to more closely match what was actually a typical home computer at the time, some 386/486 with 4 MB RAM and a small hard drive. Where I'm from, Windows 95 pretty much meant getting a new PC for the average consumer.

So you go home with your newly bought copy of Windows 95 to your 386 with 4 MB that you bought 1-2 years ago, perform the minimum installation to your 100 MB hard drive and find out that it's super slow and constantly using virtual memory making the loud disk sound like a Geiger counter throughout the session. You compare it to Windows 3.11, DOS, whatever you had before and have a pretty solid basis for complaining about its resource usage.

Or worse, you read about Windows 95 and decide to finally sell your increasingly irrelevant Amiga 1200/3000/whatever now that you can also have preemptive multitasking on a PC, buy a cheap PC matching the Win 95 requirements with the money and install. Only to learn that it's 100x slower than Workbench, BSODs nearly as often as the Amiga gurus out, uses megabytes of RAM instead of kilobytes.

Or you have a Macintosh, couldn't care less about how exactly multitasking is achieved, and wow, PC seems like a nice option now that that too has a nice, user friendly GUI. And it works on cheap, affordable hardware! So you buy the cheapest, most affordable hardware that'll support Windows 95...

Linux/Unix user since the 2003.

1) Windows 95 is a good UI design, better than even CDE. Heck, Win3.1 and CDE shared a lot of stuff.

2) ICEWM was golden back in 2001. Guess what mimicked.

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