Screen Usage in Computer Applications Back-in-the-Day

1 pointbudhajeewa1 comment

Remember how back in the day, computer applications were so inconsiderate about the screen space allocated to the "payload content" and just kept on piling various menu bars, toolbars, sidebars, etc to fill the screen, so that you could hardly see the content you were working on?

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I remember some software that made inefficient use of the display, but the best programs were carefully designed to show as much of the user’s work as possible, on screens with far fewer pixels or character cells than those of today.

For example, the WriteNow word processor for Macintosh computers was successful, in part, because of its user interface design, which put the horizontal ruler in a separate, undecorated window, with the controls for paragraph alignment, tab stops, and line spacing kept hidden until needed, but still discoverable. This worked well, especially on nine-inch desktop (512×342) or first-generation PowerBook (640×400) displays.

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