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Comment by Paianni | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that Windows 95's window minimisation was at heart a workaround for the fact that the architecture couldn't support workspaces and therefore they had to find a way to 'hack' Windows to hide windows at will.

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For the user experience level they were designing towards, workspaces would have been a recipe for "I broke my computer, all my work is gone" support calls on a constant basis.

For users that can't grasp that minimized windows become icons on their desktop or that directories can themselves contain directories, having everything switch to a new workspace will look to them identically to either one of an "I just broke it" or "It just deleted/erased/destroyed everything I was working on" result (and which result occurs depends upon whether they blame themselves or the machine as the cause).

Sadly, the result is that us advanced users, who do understand workspaces and can make productive use of them, were left without them being available until win10.

Windows 3.1 had window minimization. Confusingly, programs became icons in your "desktop" (which you could only see when minimizing everything).

Even better, on Windows 3.1 a minimized program could draw to its "icon" (it's actually a tiny window). For instance, a minimized clock could still show the current time. That was one of the things lost with the Windows 95 UI changes.

And don't forget MDI, best shown by the Windows 3.1 Program Manager: a MDI program would have several inner windows within it, and each of these inner windows could be resized, moved, minimized or maximized, all within the boundaries of the main program window.

I know it's not popular, but I actually like MDI apps.

A lesser known program for Windows 3.1/3.11 was at the time the Norton Desktop, see:

http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html

that provided, even on Windows 3.1/3.11 roughly the same UI of the Mac OS of the time, very similar, for some aspects, to the later Windows 9x one.

For some aspects, yes. For the over-all experience, not similar at all.

PC Tools for Windows was another lternative shell. Finicky and prone to crashes, but better UI design than the Norton Desktop.

Windows 95 obsoleted them both.

I remember someone who had an all-in-one Compaq PC with a version of Win 3.1 that had a shell with tabs on the top, not too unlike the "ribbon" of modern MS Office.

Possibly a Contura Aero with TabWorks?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks

http://www.supervinx.com/OnlineMuseum/Compaq/Contura/Aero%20...

Amiga Workbench did the same thing, the minimize button was labeled as "iconify" instead.

Confusingly? This is exactly how iphone works.

Some SVGA cards provide drivers for Windows 3.1 that added "virtual screen". It allowed to use a virtual screen bigger that the actual video resolution. To screen along these virtual screen, was only necessary to move the mouse to the edge of the visible screen. Also, X11 allowed to do this.

I think it like a poor's man alternative to workspaces.

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