Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrRadar | Hacker News Reader

I think Classic MacOS/System 7 (from the same era) holds up pretty well too. It's been a long, slow decline ever since. Hopefully the trends will come back around soon.

EDIT: I just remembered a video I found a month ago with a mock-up of a "Windows 95 Mobile" OS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DDQumaaCg The screens that look like they were mocked up specifically for the video (as opposed to the ones that are just screenshots of Windows 9x-era desktop applications) look like they would make for quite a nice UX.

View on HN

There was a lot I liked about System 7, but I always hated how Mac OS handled multitasking. And Mac OS 8 IMO was a massive improvement aesthetically. Back in the day when OS 8 was stuck in development hell, I was a diehard Aaron user just because I liked the look and feel so much.

Windows 95's taskbar was a godsend. It was IMO the first GUI approach to multitasking that worked, and on top of that you had Alt-Tab which was the icing on the cake. Mac OS tried to emulate that with Command-Tab, but it never worked as well as on Windows (IMO the only desktop to ever improve on Windows Alt-Tab was KDE, especially when they switched to vertical layout in 3.3 or so).

Now, if you started talking about merging the Win95 multitasking UI with the rest of the System 7 GUI and Mac OS 8's theme, you've got my ear.

I'd give time for a tiny bsd/linux/rtos with a minuscule gui layer with bit of macos and windows. A secure, a bit modern reincarnation of the old T.Rexes

The initial release of MacOS server was a cool hybrid of classic MacOS and next. I really liked it.

a bit like win2k then, new core, classic gui

That does look nice! The scrollbars are missing, though. I know they're ugly, but the classic scrollbar provides all kinds of useful functionality that's lacking in modern UIs.

(Also the UI elements are way too small to actually use on a touch screen without a stylus. But I wish we could get them back on our non-touchscreen PCs.)

yeah quite probably, I never owned a classic mac (only a mac mini but ran headless)

As a teen I despised this gui paradigm, I found it too limited, I actually wanted something like a smalltalk image or an html/js thing where you could extend all the things at will. But with age, I learned that it's rarely necessary.

I actually think in today’s absurdist nostalgia-driven culture this would sell significantly if it were a real, perhaps kickstarter-funded product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com